The abstract artist Robert Mangold has been so remarkably consistent and disciplined with his approach to painting and drawing that he makes pretty much everyone else look capricious and changeable.
Mangold has been exploring geometry, form and color for more than 60 years, with a half-century of that time on a charming property here in the Hudson Valley with an old farmhouse and a barn.
Now 87, Mangold has definitely slowed down. But he is still working, and he has a show of recent paintings and works on paper at Pace Gallery in Chelsea that opens on Friday.
“Robert Mangold: Pentagons and Folded Space” is timed to coincide with the busy spring art season in New York and remains on view until Aug. 15.
The exhibition has 19 works, and some have multiple components — including “Four Pentagons” (2022), a four-panel work that is one of his largest in decades — so it may seem even bigger, and it spreads over two floors. (“Four Pentagons” and a few other works are on loan from museums or private collections, in this case from the Art Institute of Chicago.)
Mangold can spend years iterating on a shape. Circles and semicircles are forms that he has returned to again and again, sometimes embedded with or embedded in rectilinear forms, as in “Circle Painting #4” (1973), which sold for $365,000 at Christie’s in 2014.
Seated at his kitchen table in April with his wife, the artist Sylvia Plimack Mangold, he mused on why pentagons and other polygons had his attention right now — and why they feature pointier, more acute angles than in much of his previous work, the abstract equivalent of sharp elbows.
“I was just thinking today it might have to do with the world we’re living in right now,” Mangold said after several days of the extreme gyrations of world financial markets. “There’s a sense of the collapsing of the internal space of the pictures. Instead of expanding, it’s contracting.”
Mangold is a true believer when it comes to the force that can be exerted by an artwork without an obvious figural reference point, what he called “a physical power that creates its own reality.”
In the last few months, Mangold has focused on working in a smaller studio on the property, where he makes small works on paper with pencil and pastel, a physically easier process for him than making larger paintings in his barn.
He rubs the pastel on with a paper towel, the same technique seen in works in the Pace show like “Folded Space 3” (2024). Often his drawings have paved the way for a later painting of the same composition.
Although he is classified as a Minimalist or Conceptualist, Mangold’s works have a vibrancy and warmth that does not necessarily come across in a reproduction.
“His work never fit the aggressive Minimalist thing,” said Barbara Haskell, a longtime curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has more than a dozen Mangold works in its collection.
“There’s a lyricism, the delicacy of his line, combined with the strict geometry,” Haskell said. “That’s what gives them their energy.”
Color plays a big role in Mangold’s work, but he tends not to pick bright primary tones. “You can’t describe his colors,” Plimack Mangold said. (Pace recently began representing her work, too; she is known for paintings in a more figural vein.)
Many hues in his earlier works were inspired by the color of objects, including New York buildings and manila envelopes. “I had a staple gun that was gray-green, and I remember using that color,” Mangold said.
Pace’s founder, Arne Glimcher, who has been representing Mangold since 1991, said, “The idea of the power of color in Bob’s work is the same as with Rothko: conveying emotion with reduced means.”
A native of upstate New York (“I’m a country bumpkin,” he said.), Mangold studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the late 1950s, and in 1958 he went to see a prominent biennial exhibition in Pittsburgh, which later evolved to become the Carnegie International.
Among the artists featured were Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly and Mark Rothko.
“I saw Abstract Expressionist work there for the first time,” Mangold recalled. “It set me off. It took my breath away.”
In the early 1960s, both Mangolds attended Yale University School of Art and Architecture, where he got a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. They were married in 1961. In the same era, Mangold did a stint as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art.
“It was a very nice job; you didn’t come in until 11 and you were off at 5,” he said.
The Picassos there, and his evolution, stuck with Mangold — even though his own style history would not follow suit. “I couldn’t get over the fact that he started one way, and then went another way,” Mangold said.
Manhattan living influenced his art, in subtle ways.
“My first paintings when I came to New York were very inspired by the city’s buildings and trucks,” he said. “You didn’t see everything at once — you’d see pieces of things, like a piece of a truck going by our studio on the Bowery.”
He liked to work on sizable canvases when he could. “I wanted a physical scale I could stand by and relate to, and connect to,” he said.
Mangold was included in a landmark 1968 show that inaugurated Paula Cooper Gallery, the first art gallery in Soho. It had an anti-Vietnam War theme and included many big names, notably one of Mangold’s best friends, the artist Sol LeWitt.
Cooper said that she was delighted by Mangold’s painting in the show — Mangold recalled that the work was “1/2 Manila Curved Area (Divided)” (1967) — and she noted that he was a “quieter and less sensational” member of his artistic generation compared to his peers.
Despite showing in galleries, Mangold was not making much money from his art in the early years. “They weren’t selling,” he said. “It took so many years to get a painting that sold for $1,000.”
A Guggenheim Museum solo show that began in 1971 helped his reputation. That was around when the Mangolds started spending time in the country, and by 1975 they had moved to their current property.
Their son, the filmmaker James Mangold, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for directing “A Complete Unknown,” said that his parents lived a somewhat “cloistered” existence there during his childhood and since then, but that it had paid off in their art.
“I very much got from them the importance of finding your voice, your place and your language,” James Mangold said. “You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing at that moment.”
In his sky lit barn studio, Robert Mangold sat in a chair and talked about how and why he uses a roller to apply paint, which is easier than using the sprayer he employed before 1968.
“It’s a way of putting the paint on without the artist’s touch — there’s a machine between me and it,” he said, echoing the depersonalization that was a tenet of 20-century abstraction. But his influences are many. He also noted that he evokes the quality of Italian frescoes by using a thinned out acrylic paint.
Amid the completed works hanging in the barn, there were two stark-white blank canvases. In a far corner, one shaped like a polygon was particularly on Mangold’s mind as a potential future painting, for when he is feeling up to it.
“I have this stretched and ready to go,” he said.
The post Color, Form and Geometry Are the Through Lines in Robert Mangold’s Career appeared first on New York Times.
