FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Entertainment

A Different Kind of Light Art Hits a Swiss Gallery

Heinz Mack is a different kind of light artist. The ZERO co-founder gets a gallery show in Switzerland.
Heinz Mack, Dynamische Struktur schwarz-weiß (1957-1958). All photos by Ginevra Agliardi, courtesy of Cortesi Gallery, London - Lugano.

Following a couple years of ZERO trending hardcore after museum shows in New York and Berlin, the Cortesi Gallery Lugano, Switzerland is putting on a show dedicated to the work of the group’s co-founder, Heinz Mack. The Visible Reminder of Invisible Light will be on view from May 11 to July 22.

Mack founded ZERO with fellow artist Otto Piene. They made work focusing on light, space, movement, rejecting emotional styles like Abstract Expressionism in the process. Mack, Piene, and a third artist associated with ZERO’s foundation, Günther Uecker, quickly found international allies in art movements like Nouveau Réalisme, Arte Povera, and Minimalism, in artists like Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Yayoi Kusama, Jésus Rafael Soto, and more.

Advertisement

Dynamiche Struktur in Schwarz (1962).

Founded in the late ‘50s, ZERO’s stoicism was prompted by the artists’ surroundings: a destroyed postwar Europe, and a defeated Germany. For Mack, Piene, and Uecker, this was a new beginning, a new art, one that started from “zero.” It manifested as minimal purity, made of industrial materials, but also of immaterial ones like water vapor, electricity, heat, and fire. Once, as an exploration of freedom, light, and land untouched by humans, Mack drove into the Sahara desert and installed a (stolen) mirror on-site.

The show at Cortesi Gallery will display works from the 1950s through the 1970s, made from materials like aluminum, resin, and glass, including a number of light reliefs and studies on dynamic structures and forms. See more of the works featured in the show, below:

Relief Lumineux (Lichtrelief) (1959).

Erzengel Michael und Gabriel (1972)

Relief with Serial Reflectors (1961).

Untitled (Lichtrelief) (1964)

Find out more about The Visible Reminder of Invisible Light on Cortesi Gallery's website.

Related:

Meet the Artists Behind Darkside’s Mirrored Moon Tour Sculpture

Take an Electrifying Look Inside the World’s First Light Art Museum

Watch a Light Art Installation Get Down in the Club