Pace Gallery is pleased to present Robert Mangold: Paintings and Works on Paper 2013 – 2017, an exhibition of the artist’s most recent work. His fourteenth solo exhibition with Pace, this recent body of large scale paintings and works on paper highlight Mangold’s continued evolution and mastery of abstract painting. Robert Mangold: Paintings and Works on Paper 2013 – 2017 will be on view from May 6 to June 17, 2017 at 508/510 West 25th Street. Pace will publish a catalogue to accompany the exhibition, with an essay by Marla Prather, former curator at the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, and most recently Senior Consultant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prather previously wrote on the artist for the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, as well as for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

Mangold’s new works, as Prather writes, show “He is artistically principled but not formally dogmatic, and that the mutability of any formula has become one of the touchstones of his life’s work.” Exploring the possibilities of punctured shapes, and the relationships between painted surface, drawing, and the wall, Mangold’s new works are a continuation of ideas explored in Pace’s 2014 exhibition Robert Mangold. No longer working in series Mangold has allowed ideas in one painting to evolve into the next. In his new work the artist creates complex compositions consisting of multi-paneled shaped canvases with multiple apertures, hand drawn graphite lines, and subtly modulated planes of color as always with unconscious references to earlier aspects of his work.

Robert Mangold: Paintings and Works on Paper 2013 – 2017 reveals Mangold’s masterful combination of the elements that make up his paintings, balancing “line, color and shape in equal measure.” Each aspect of the work is considered and plays its role in determining the whole, none overpowering another. The paintings are on canvas but as Prather notes, regarding Two Open Squares Within a Green Area, 2016, “the artist circumnavigates the openings with lines that clarify that his work is as much about drawing as it is about painting.” A further insight into Mangold’s process and the importance of drawing can be seen in the artist’s works on paper, which have been given their own space in the exhibition. Although not direct studies for the paintings in the exhibition, these works show the evolution of ideas from paper to canvas as well as from one painting to the next.

Robert Mangold (b. 1937, North Tonawanda, NY) studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art before attending the Yale University School of Art and Architecture; he received both B.F.A (1961) and M.F.A. (1963) degrees from Yale.

Since his first solo exhibition 50 years ago, Mangold’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, traveling exhibitions, and retrospectives throughout the United States and abroad, including Robert Mangold at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1971); Robert Mangold: Paintings 1971–1984, organized by the Akron Art Museum with subsequent venues in New York, Texas and California (1984– 86); Robert Mangold: Painting on Paper, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (1988); Robert Mangold: Recent Works, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (1990); Robert Mangold: Painting as Wall, Werke von 1964 bis 1993, organized by the Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen, with subsequent venues in Paris, Münster and Lisbon (1993–95); Robert Mangold, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela (1999); Robert Mangold: X, Plus and Frame Paintings, Works from the 1980s at the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London (2009); Robert Mangold: Continuity and Discontinuity, Cleveland Institute of Art (2011); and Robert Mangold: A Survey 1965–2003, Mnuchin Gallery, New York (2017).

Mangold has completed three public commissions: a stained-glass window for Oberlin’s historic Finney Chapel by architect Cass Gilbert, the unveiling of which coincided with his solo exhibition Robert Mangold: The Oberlin Window at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College (1992), and twice for the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program, first to make two outdoor works for the John W. Bricker Federal Building in Columbus, and later to make monumental stained-glass windows for the Federal Courthouse Building in Buffalo, which were unveiled in 2012 and anticipated by the related solo exhibition Robert Mangold, Beyond the Line: Paintings and Project 2000–2008 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2009).

Early in his career, Mangold received a National Endowment for the Visual Arts Fellowship (1967). He became a recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1969. In 1993, he was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Painting from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Robert Mangold became a trustee of Yale University Art Gallery (1999) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001). In 2007 Mangold was honored at the Drawing Center’s 30th anniversary Gala. Mangold’s work can be found in more than 75 public collections in the United States and abroad including Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Fundació “la Caixa,” Barcelona; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Des Moines Art Center; Musée de Grenoble, France; Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Menil Collection, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon; Tate Gallery, London; J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Tokyo

Metropolitan Art Museum; Museum Ludwig, Vienna; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Robert Mangold lives and works in upstate New York. Pace has represented the artist since 1991 and this will be the fourteenth solo exhibition of his work at the gallery.