Untitled 1967

Heinz Mack made this untitled work, with ink on paper, sometime during his career. Mack, who came of age in post-war Germany, founded the ZERO group, which aimed to strip art of its traditional and historical baggage. The visual language here is elemental: stark black and white, simple geometric forms, and the grid. We might read this as a utopian impulse, a desire for a clean slate after the devastation of war. But there's also something unsettling here. The grid, a symbol of order, is irregular and unstable, threatening to dissolve. This tension speaks to the anxieties of a society rebuilding itself, caught between the desire for stability and the awareness of fragility. To fully understand this work, we might turn to manifestos of the ZERO group, or consider the architecture and design of the period. Art is never made in a vacuum, and an art historian's job is to explore the rich interplay between art and its context.