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Robert Mangold

Distorted Circle within a Polygon II, 1972

Now On View

Description

Maker

Title

Distorted Circle within a Polygon II

Year

1972

Medium

Acrylic and graphite on shaped canvas

Materials/Techniques

Materials

Supports

Dimensions

224.2 x 203.8 cm (88 1/4 x 80 1/4 inches)

Type

Credit

The Albert Pilavin Memorial Collection of 20th-Century American Art

Object Number

73.018

Projects & Publications

Publications

Exhibition History

Exhibition History

The Phantom of Liberty

May 4 - December 30, 2018

I’m never sure how I got into doing the circle paintings. One story I tell, . . . Sylvia [Plimack Mangold] and I spent a summer at Al Held’s farm in Boiceville, New York. . . . I was sitting there looking at curved hills and I started doing some funny kind of landscape works that had a slightly atmospheric rectangular top and then a curved bottom. I think it may have come from that summer where I was just looking at that space in nature, but when I got back to the city I started working with a compass curve, in a sense, and did a series of paintings that were parts of circles, a half-circle broken in different ways. –Robert Mangold

Waterman Galleries

Distorted Circle within a Polygon II is one in a series of works Mangold made in the early 1970s that create a tension between two basic geometric forms: the line painted on the picture plane and the shaped canvas that forms the work’s ground and structure. The conflict between these opposing shapes is tempered by use of flat, muted color, in this instance a grayish-green. Mangold’s work differed from other Minimalist practice of the 1960s and 1970s in his emphasis on subtle irregularities—note the distortion of this circle, within an irregular polygon. These differences imbue his work with a more “human” quality.

Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in Copyright. This object is Distorted Circle within a Polygon II with the accession number of 73.018. To request a higher resolution file, please submit an online request.