Robert Mangold Biography
Robert Mangold was born in 1937 in Buffalo, New York. In 1956 he enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the following year he visited the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, where he had the opportunity to observe the works of numerous Abstract Expressionist painters, and an important exhibition of paintings by Clyfford Still at Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Shortly thereafter, his paintings began to express his interest in Abstract Expressionism, as well as his interest in two other artists, Alberto Burri and Antonio Tàpies. He began working on large-scale abstract paintings, abandoning his early interest in naturalism. Graduating in 1959, he obtained a scholarship to attend the Yale Summer School of Music and Art and in the fall of 1960 began postgraduate courses at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture. Here he experiments with many styles. His classmates include Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, Richard Serra. In 1962 he moved to New York, where he worked first as a security guard and then at the library of the Museum of Modern Art, meeting other artists there, including Robert Ryman and Sol LeWitt. In 1964 he began his minimalist paintings for which he later became known. His first solo exhibition was in 1965, at the Fischbach Gallery in New York. In 1966 he was included in the first major exhibition of minimalist painting, "Primary Structures", presented at the Jewish Museum in New York. In 1968 he replaced the oil colors with acrylics, which he spread with a roller on masonite or plywood bases, and then switched, in the same year, from industrial bases to canvas. In 1970 he began painting shaped canvases and, in the same year, using brushes to apply colour. Numerous solo exhibitions dedicated to him by museums, for example the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1971), the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (1974), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1982), the Musée d'Orsay in Paris ( 2006). In his most recent series of works, Mangold employs his well-known expressive economies of gesture and color in shapes and elements such as rings and columns. Mangold lives and works in Washingtonville, New York.
