By Editors
Since 1965, when the earliest work in this concise four-decade survey was made, Mangold has been shaping canvas or Masonite, painting it in a single color, and testing its boundaries with pencil lines. In “Circle Painting #4,” from 1973, the canvas is four feet in diameter, the color is a muted purple, and the pencil drawing is an inscribed square that doesn’t quite fit—two corners overlap the painting’s edges, setting up a strangely ethereal tension. Three large pieces from the nineties, in which separate panels of different colors are held together with black pencil ellipses, achieve a similarly serene imbalance. But in two tantalizing paintings from the previous decade Mangold does just the opposite, pairing narrow rectangular segments in taut, multicolored works that seem held together by sheer force of will.