Mack at ZKM

Mirror objects in the glaring desert sun, shimmering color prisms in the Arctic, light-reflecting stelae, magically vibrating rotors, gold and silver gleaming cubes, virtual volumes generated by electrical impulses: Heinz Mack, artist of light, illuminates the atriums of ZKM in a variety of ways.

Since the 1950’s Heinz Mack (b. 1931) has been searching to create a new harmony between humankind, nature, and technology. Throughout this time, he has used natural elements in his artworks, such as light, fire, air, water, and sand, as creative means of expression. Working with kinetic principles, new industrial and chemical materials, Mack developed his expanded concept of sculpture. Light, movement, structure, and color are central to his practice. His works are conceived as “instruments of light,” connecting with the surrounding space and interacting directly with the viewers.

With fellow artist Otto Piene, Mack founded the group ZERO in Düsseldorf in 1957, with the intent to revolutionize art in the vacuum left by the Second World War. ZERO stood for a new beginning, a zero hour, from which artists would help shape a new world that embraced experimentation and new technologies. Mack has an exceptionally wide-ranging and diverse oeuvre. His artistic career has followed not so much a linear and more of spiral development, that loops, repeats and connects different themes.

The exhibition presents works from the various phases of Mack’s artistic career. Previously rarely exhibited works are restaged and some lost works have been reconstructed. The focus of this selection is Mack’s sculptures and environments that interact with light, space, and time in unique ways: various light reliefs, which are not driven by kinetic engines, but exhibit areas of varying brightness due to the incidence of light and the structural properties of the work’s surface; a reconstruction of the Phosphorus Room, which was realized for the first and only time for the exhibition Hommage à Georges de La Tour in Berlin in 1960; the especially light-intensive installation Ad Alta Potenza –16,000 Watts (1976/2023, idea: 1960); and rotors, light stelae, cubes, as well as light kinetic objects. Mack’s diverse light works and environments offer multisensory, immersive experiences. This is particularly exemplified by the Light Choreography a composition comprising various works by the artist which is being presented for the first time in this form. The staging of the Sahara Project, which Mack has repeatedly revisited and developed since 1959, will revive the light phenomena from the interaction with the blazing sun in a museum context. Through his interventions in the desert and in the Arctic, Mack is today considered a pioneer of Land Art. This comprehensive overview of the artist’s oeuvre is rounded off with a selection of little-known architectural models and with artworks that evidence Mack’s pathbreaking work in the field of European Minimal Art. In the dynamic structure of these monochromes and the shadow patterns they create, one can already recognize the artist’s interrogation of light as an artistic material, which is resisted by the surface’s relief effect.

Mack at ZKM shows an artist who has constantly explored the many facets of light, rather like a scientist examining an object in a series of experiments. His continuous pursuit of immateriality opens a space for an expanded experience of art. From a contemporary perspective the work anticipates some of the urgent questions we face in the 21st century. From his works using air, water, light, and sand we can draw lines that connect with current issues connected with the economy, culture and politics of the Earth’s natural resources. His artistic approach to nature and technology sets a stage for reflection on the challenges of the humanmade climate catastrophe that we are now confronting.

Curators: Alistair Hudson, Daria Mille, and Clara Runge
Curatorial assistance: Katharina Kern, Vivien Ranger

In memory of Peter Weibel (1944–2023), on whose idea this exhibition is based.

Please find further information here.

Press contact: Felix Brenner, felix.brenner [​at​] zkm.de / T +49 (0) 721-8100-1821