and random, as well as this primitivist reduction, make Mack

the source of an exceptional phenomenological unfolding. The

viewer is prompted to feel the tangible experience of vision,

and to consider time and space as entirely separate mediums.

The very first works characteristic of the artist appeared around

1950, in the context of the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf, and then

during his philosophy studies at the local university. From the

beginning the artist favored a willingly abstract and non-figurative

language, while being disappointed in most of the recent

developments in that trend, which he deemed academic and too

indebted to traditional composition and imagery. On the other

hand, the historic avant-garde of Constructivism, Futurism or De

Stijl drew his attention. Around 1953-54, he quickly conceived

paintings, reliefs, and sculptures according to a radical logic,

one that is still unfolding today in his daily practice, at his studios

in Mönchengladbach and Ibiza. This esthetic principle includes

his numerous voyages to the Sahara, where beginning in 1962

his productions and actions prefigured North American Land Art.

The years between 1957-1966 were an equally crucial period:

with Otto Piene and later Günther Uecker (who joined them in

1962), Mack was the founder and central figure of ZERO, a

multifaceted artistic entity and international hub of the kinetic

renewal of abstraction, which had Yves Klein and Jesús Rafael

Soto as members, to name just a few. Numerous institutions,

with the assistance of the ZERO Foundation in Düsseldorf, have

recently endeavored to present this complex movement, from the

Guggenheim in New York to the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, along

with the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, or the Galeries Nationales

du Grand Palais in Paris with the exhibition “DYNAMO”—whose

title I had suggested in reference to the repeated use of the

term by Mack himself during this historical period. The 1970s

and 1980s fall within a single esthetic singularity, in which a

number of Mack’s sculptures—including numerous steles and

other obelisks that were willingly off scale—engaged in a rich

dialogue with architecture and urban space, primarily throughout

all of Germany.

On his business card, Mack presents himself as a “sculptor and

painter”. The order in which these mentions is important, as it

gives precedence to the modulation of matter in space over

the creation of images on a painting’s surface. In other words,

even the canvases stretched over frames—paintings—from the

ZERO period are covered in a material whose abundant impasto

pushes them toward the relief, that intermediary domain of art

history somewhere between painting and sculpture, and whose

elements are significantly raised from the surface on which they

are fixed. Their appearance remains ambiguous, even paradoxical,

making it difficult to fix them mentally or photographically. For

Mack’s work exists only in a double movement of appearance

and disappearance. The unstable material is constantly eroded

by darkness or light. We have a paradox here—one that is

inseparable from the history of Kinetic art and Perceptual art, of

which Mack was a central figure—between the tangible simplicity

of the material fact, and the insolvable mystery of its effects.