(born in Lollar, Hessen in 1931)
Quartet, 1965, each signed, dated mack 65, pastel and wax crayon on paper, dimensions in order from left to right: no. 1, 3 & 4 158 x 123.5 cm, no. 2 157.5 x 118.5 cm, framed (4)

Certificate:
Atelier Heinz Mack, Mönchengladbach, August 2012, signed by the artist

Provenance:
The artist
Private Collection Germany

Exhibited/Literature:
Akademie der Künste Berlin, Objekte, Aktionen, Projekte,
20 October – 3 December 1972, exhib. cat. no. 44-47 (there dated 63)
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 9 March – 8 April 1973
Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Heinz Mack, 11 May – 1 July 1973, exhibit. cat. no. 29-32 (there dated 63)
Museum Ostwall, Dortmund, Heinz Mack, Zwischen den Zeiten/Between the times, 6 May – 29 July 2012, Bönen 2012, exhibit. cat no. 27, p. 147, p. 54-57 with colour ill.

The ZERO group, founded in Düsseldorf on 24 April 1958 by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, saw post-war art as "burdened with an excess of ballast" - the "zero hour" was their new beginning. The timelessness of the new and universal artistic language of the dynamics and immaterial structure of light discovered by the visionary Mack continues to fascinate to this day.

In 1963, Mack provisionally stopped painting on canvas. Nevertheless, the materialisation of light through colour plays a role in his structural drawings - so-called colour chromatics. The even application of pastel chalk on a relief base creates a rhythmic sequence of colours rich in nuances which thematise the ever-changing light.

The museum-quality, early four-part ZERO work Quartett (1965) dates from this turbulent period of innovative artistic experimentation. The four colour-coordinated pastels on paper each show a slender vertical texture in a harmonious colour gradient arranged centrally on the sheet. Red develops into yellow, blue through green to yellow, white to black, and finally black to white. "Painting has always fascinated me when it is filled with light. (...)

The identity of light and colour, which becomes visible in the spectrum, is the subject of my painting," is how Heinz Mack comments on his turn to painting.

The four pastels are thus the counterpart to the well-known colourful Dynamic Structures from the ZERO period and thus also anticipate Heinz Mack's later Chromatic Constellations. This painterly dissection of light into its spectral parts is accompanied, as in the 1950s, by modulations of black-and-white structures, by frame and grid images.

In the Quartet (1965), Mack's intensive examination of the theme of light becomes particularly clear. It is broken down into its spectral elements by the colour gradients, analogous to a prism. Heinz Mack thus conveys the multitude of parallel horizontal strokes in the same colour spectrum: continuity through the "primacy of colour".

The works of the Quartet interact with each other through this modulated vibration of colour progression. In doing so, they reject any claim to history, to painting, and nevertheless return to the origin of all existence - to ZERO, to the zero hour - when light met the world.

Heinz Mack, Zwischen den Zeiten / Between the times, exhib. cat. Dortmund 2012

“The line’s unrest: it wants to be surface; the surface’s unrest: it wants to be space. Our artistic sensitivity follows this unrest.

Lines, surface and space have to merge continuously, ‘neutralize‘ one another, in the dialectic sense that our language allows. If this integration remains visible, the image will vibrate, and our eye will find the calmness of unrest.“

Goepfert und Zero, Steinernes Haus am Römerberg, Frankfurt/Main, 29 April – 31 May 1987, Frankfurt 1987, p. 42