Is art meant to elicit some kind of emotional response? Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, two German artists, decided in the ’50s that feeling things was overrated and chose instead to make art that was about (and for) nothing. Nada, zilch and, yup, zero. Their ‘Zero’ movement was about removing all the emotion and colour and letting art exist for its own sake.
So what’s left when you reduce everything to nothing? In Mack’s early Zero-period works on display here (canvases, sculptures and kinetic works), he gives you a blank emotional slate to project on, and it’s great. Simple black-and-white stripes dominate the paintings – little visual battles between darkness and light. Some are almost completely black, others bright and grey. There’s so little happening that you’re drawn in, forced to consider the paint, the shapes, the lacquer, the canvas itself. They’re just paintings, nothing more.
Steel sculptures dot the room – nasty pointed shapes, gleaming like models for future skyscrapers. A large light box fills one wall. Under its clear rippled surface a disc of reflective aluminium spins silently, its shapes twisting as it moves.
These early works are powerful, simple, beautiful and empty. They leave the thinking to the viewer. Some of the newer works by the 83-year-old do a good approximation of that too. They’re just bigger, more confident, less subtle. However, two recent multi-coloured canvases in stripes and blocks of yellow, orange and blue seem like travesties. They’re like fifteenth-rate Rothkos, like something you’d buy in an art gallery in Marbella to decorate your holiday home. You can’t avoid them either. Even if you’re not looking at them, the damn things are reflected in the steel sculptures.
But the early works are so good that it almost doesn’t matter. Strong, appealing and gutsy, they’re worth a visit alone.
Eddy Frankel