Gift of John Andrew MacMahon '95

Robert Mangold is an American artist known for his contribution to Minimalism and his focus on the fundamentals of formal construction in painting, sculpture, and drawing. His shaped panel paintings use subtle modulations of color and precise graphite lines to confront the viewer with a difficult, yet meditative experience. “My belief about painting is that it’s the most difficult art to grasp,” Mangold once told BOMB magazine. “And abstract painting makes it even more difficult, because the person walking in off the street doesn’t have a place to grab hold of…if you come into a room where there’s an installation or a sculpture, you know to walk around it, it exists in your space with you; there’s no way to kill time in front of a painting.” Born on October 12, 1937 in North Tonawanda, NY, he went on to study first at the Cleveland Institute of Art, then the Yale School of Art where he received his MFA in 1963. Mangold’s work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. He lives and works in New York with his wife and fellow painter Sylvia Plimack Mangold.

Van Every/Smith Galleries Blog, NEW ACQUISITION: 1, FROM DISTORTED SQUARE WITHIN A CIRCLE, by Oliver Poduschnick ‘25