Robert Mangold: Pentagons and Folded Space at Pace

Installation view. Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

By MICHAEL KLEIN August 23, 2025 

For more than six decades, painter and printmaker Robert Mangold has been engaged in a study of geometry and color. His formula for his work has remained consistent over time, but what is the great mastery here is his ability to invent and re-invent, reinterpret forms and colors. Like many of his generation, he first came across the rejection of Abstract Expressionist and Pop movement styles. Then came a renewed belief in simple modern elemental forms of art making. Minimal art was born to a generation that understood how to explore the realm of the essential; the keyword for this new movement: its focus on the basics - shape, line color that was the formula. It becomes formulaic for Mangold in his first shows in the 1960s and continues with this latest body of work, dated from 2022 to 2024. 

Not a theorist per se, but Mangold has outlined his point of view: “It seemed to me when I began that the only way to make a painting was to start at zero and add one thing at a time.” And from a 2001 interview with this author, Mangold told me, “As a painter, I control what I do in my studio. If I'm working on something that really engages me, I'm satisfied. I work intuitively around an idea and continue with it until it runs out for me.” It is very evident from his long career that a remarkable body of works exists, and the ideas keep emerging and new directions are made manifest year by year. 

Robert Mangold, Divided Image, 2024. © Robert Mangold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

This latest group of works focuses heavily on shape, one might even call them eccentric shapes, because they are a play on the usual square or rectangular format of a painting. But typical of Mangold, he invents new shapes or forms that have a somewhat sculptural feel to them, though they remain flat paintings. Color too is explored here, nuances and shades instead of more primary hues, ignoring palettes of say solid red, yellow, or blue. Scale too is important. Nothing is “oversized or monumental”; it is tempered domestic in size, which balances with the somewhat exotic and cleverly shaped paintings. There are many diptychs in the show, the right canvas a mirror of the left and vice versa. This is typical of Mangold to consider the shape of the canvas not as a given but something to be explored, exchanging a rectangle for a polygon or a square for a tondo. Shape has always been a hallmark of Mangold’s paintings, whether it is this new series of pentagons or his famous and well-documented series of Xs and Frame paintings he made in the 1980s. He sees geometry not as a limitation but, in fact, a system and structure through which and by which he can explore, examine, invent, and find new solutions. Minimal is a style, but it in no way does it suggest a limit to Mangold’s imagination or vision — in fact, a mini survey in 2017 at Mnuchin Gallery in New York presented the viewer with an overview of his many years of thinking and producing abundant visual solutions in paint on canvas. Each work exemplified a new focus and its resolution.  

At Pace Gallery, a suite of works on paper accompanies the paintings. Here, we see how ideas develop from paper to canvas. I would describe them less as studies and more as exercises in creating shaped works.  

From my point of view, each Mangold exhibition is the ongoing evolution of a painter whose pictorial language and thinking are a constant reinvention of the basic tenets of Minimal art. What I have always found interesting about his work is the way he can extend the ideas here, find new solutions, and posit another answer to the question of what makes a painting. WM