On View: 21 October – 20 December, 2025
October 2, 2025 (Germany) – Almine Rech and Fondation Le Corbusier are pleased to present Heinz Mack's solo exhibition at Maison La Roche in Paris, on view from October 21 — December 20, 2025.
Heinz Mack (born in Lollar, 1931) is one of the primary figures of the art of the second half of the 20th century as he is considered to be a radical and revolutionary artist, who from the 1950s to today has continued to renew his vision and expressivity. The works exhibited at Maison La Roche, architectural icon by Le Corbusier where light itself plays a highly significant role in redefining the coordinates of spaces and volumes, are dated between 1995 and 2021, explore the artist’s investigation and redefinition of the relationship between light, color, structure, and space.
Mack’s lifelong artistic production has always been investigating the fundamental role that light plays as a constitutive factor of vision, creating an impressive body of work that has radically changed the course of contemporary art. The dialogue between light and colour in relation to structure, vibration, and rhythm represents the central factor of the continuation and metamorphosis of Mack’s work. In these variations in the artist’ oeuvre, light is expressed in its purity as transformation of surfaces and spaces.
In 1957 (together with the colleague and friend Otto Piene in Düsseldorf), Mack founded the international movement ZERO: since then, he has experimented with a plurality of artistic techniques, in a variable continuity that has always considered light the very core of his pictorial and plastic investigations. Light is a central theme in Mack’s non- representational art, translated into paintings and sculptures of various materials – also monumental ones for public spaces, light reliefs, light cubes, light rotors, light stelae, drawings, pastels, ink drawings, graphics, photography, mosaics, ceramics, conceptual designs of public spaces and interiors, stage settings, as well as literary works.
For Mack, light is a concrete and active metaphor for a change in perspective, which is part of an overall vision of dynamic purification, a sort of active neutralization of reality, expressed in different ways. Mack’s fundamentally new attitude towards the pictorial surface and plastic form considers it not as a window and representative or evocative extension, but as independent zones of positive events, autonomous and vital spaces. He associates light with movement in its many forms (optical dynamism, mechanism in action, luminous pulsation, open process), in order to deconstruct and reinvent representational and executive conventions. His objective and regular rhythms bring colors beyond the margins of the individual artwork, translating it into a continuum that goes beyond the visual surface, transforming painting from a static object on the wall to an articulation of real space. Mack’s architectural painting and sculpture thus both inhabit and activate Le Corbusier’s luminous spaces, in an intertwined dialogue of two languages that are both driven by a vocation to essentiality.
The attention in the exhibition is particularly driven towards Mack’s works from most recent decades, particularly the pure colors of the “Chromatische Konstellationen” (chromatic constellations), whose stratification, juxtaposition, and gradation give to the surface of the canvas new and radiant tonal harmonies. It is from the liminal zone of colour, between light and dark, which Mack considers to be the germinal place of vision, that transition from black and white to colour matured in 1991, when the artist focused on new pictorial work that translates his intuitions for redefining surface and space into an unprecedented and surprising chromatic key.
It is an inebriating sound that comes from these constellations: a sensitive thought materialized in colour-light, phenomenological meditations, and concrete utopias, where the dialectic between concentration and chromatic- luminous rarefaction produces a sparkling dynamic, punctuated by harmonies and gradations, oscillations and sequences, pulsations and microstructures.
Mack’s paintings and sculptures, layered or juxtaposed, in counterpoint or gradation, articulate the spatiality of the surface and of the plastic form in new, radiant, tonal harmonies. The purity of colour translates into continuous vibrations, a colour without limits that unfolds its phenomenology of physicality, imposing on the viewer a total, immersive, engaging chromatic experience.
Purity, together with light and polychromy, is another keyword linking directly Mack’s poetic world with Le Corbusier’s Modern Architecture: focusing on the dialectic of pure colors, Mack’s Chromatische Konstellationen (chromatic constellations), layered in transparency or juxtaposed in combination, counterpoint, or gradation, modulate and articulate the spatiality of the surface in new, radiant harmonies. Here we find the dynamic and active relationship between color, light, structure, and space that constitutes the conceptual core of these extraordinary structures of energy, both chromatic and physical.
- Francesca Pola, Heinz Mack at Maison La Roche: the purity of light and space.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
Address:
Fondation Le Corbusier
Maison La Roche
10 Square du Docteur Blanche
75016 Paris, France
Opening Times:
Tuesday – Saturday | 10am – 6pm
Closed on Sundays & Mondays
About Heinz Mack:
Heinz Mack, born in 1931 in Lollar (Hesse, Germany), attended the Academy of Arts Düsseldorf during the 1950s. In 1956 he also earned a state examination in philosophy at the University of Cologne. Together with Otto Piene he founded the group ZERO in 1957 in Düsseldorf. Besides his participation at Documenta II (1959) and Documenta III (1964), he also represented The Federal Republic of Germany at the XXXVth Venice Biennale in 1970. In the same year he was invited to Osaka (Japan) as a visiting professor. He also became a full member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, to which he belonged until 1992. Heinz Mack has been honored with major awards including the Art Prize of the City of Krefeld (1958), the Premio Marzotto (1963), the 1st Prix arts plastiques at the 4th Paris Biennale (1965), 1st prize in the international competition Licht 79 in the Netherlands (1979), the Großer Kulturpreis des Rheinischen Sparkassen-Verbands (1992) and the Cultural Prize of the city of Dortmund’s arts council (2012). He also received the Grand Federal Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2011. In 2015, Heinz Mack was unanimously voted an honorary member of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf by the academy's senate. In 2016, the city of Düsseldorf bestowed the Jan-Wellem-Ring upon Heinz Mack. He received the Moses Mendelssohn Medal in 2017. The central theme of Heinz Mack’s art is light. Sculptures and pictures are the media of his multifaceted oeuvre. The exceptionally diverse complete works include sculptures made of different materials: light-stelae, light-rotors, light-reliefs and light-cubes. His oeuvre also involves paintings, drawings, India ink, pastels, graphics, photography and bibliophilic works. Another important aspect of Mack’s work is the design of public spaces, church interiors, stage settings and mosaics. His works have been shown in nearly 300 solo exhibitions and numerous other group exhibitions. They are also found in over 170 public collections. Numerous books and two films document his work. Heinz Mack lives and works in Mönchengladbach and Ibiza.
Image Credits:
Image credits:
1. Heinz Mack, Pas de Trois (Chromatic Constellation), 2011. Acrylic on canvas. 130x160cm. 51x63in. © Heinz Mack. Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Studio Mack
2. Heinz Mack, Untitled (Chromatic Constellation), 2016 Acrylic on canvas, 140.5 x 100 cm, 551/2x391/2in. © Heinz Mack. Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech. Photo:Studio Mack
3. Heinz Mack, Untitled, 2016, Glazed Ceramic, burnished gold 30x17x9cm, 12x61/2x31/2in. © Heinz Mack. Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Studio Mack