Deconstructing Robert Mangold

Deconstructing Robert Mangold brings together an extraordinary range of conceptual, formal, and social connections between American Minimalist Robert Mangold (1937–) and other artists from the Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection. Seven of Mangold’s original woodcuts, Untitled A through G (2000) and Curved Plane Figure III (1995), are presented in dialogue with works by his contemporaries: Immovable Iconography (1990) by Nancy Graves (1939–1995) and Roses and Roofs (1987) by Janet Fish (1938–). These three artists all attended Yale University in the early 1960s; together, their works illuminate a sense of shared community in the artists’ early practice. 

Mangold’s woodcuts premiering for the first time are also presented in conversation with works such as Movement in White, Umber, and Cobalt Green (1950) by early American modernist John Marin (1870–1953), known for his abstract landscapes, and with Duet and Murmur (2014), New York­–based contemporary artist Cheonae Kim’s (1952–) paintings from her linear black-and-white series. These arrangements provide a sense of abstraction’s history and present in context with Mangold’s works. By extracting some of the Vitruvian connotations, architectonic forms, and reductive vocabulary of ellipses and squares found in Mangold’s prints, we can begin to get a sense of Minimalism’s vibrant and important thread connecting artists from the twentieth into the twenty-first centuries.

This exhibition is part of a series that started in 2013 with the exhibition Deconstructing Francis Bacon, providing scholarly meditations on the inter-connectedness of artists and works of art. 

Exhibition overview from museum website