By Marion Maneker
Mnuchin Gallery’s founder, Robert Mnuchin, discusses the work of Robert Mangold and his gallery’s show, “Robert Mangold: A Survey 1965-2003.
The exhibition begins with a selection of early works from the 1960s in which the artist inaugurates his mode of tracing hand-drawn geometric figures within the outline of a shaped support, and continues through the 1970s, featuring examples of Mangold’s Circle paintings and A Triangle Within Two Rectangles paintings. In the early 1980s, the geometric forms of the paintings’ interior compositions—in this case, Xs and +s—began to dictate the shapes of the canvases themselves. The show also includes examples of Mangold’s work from the 1990s and 2000s, including the Attic Paintings, the Plane / Figure Paintings, and the Column Paintings, speaking to the evolution of Mangold’s interest in art history.