Pentagons and Folded Space
Pace Gallery
May 9–August 15, 2025
New York
When Robert Mangold began showing his work in the mid-sixties, Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly occupied opposite poles on the abstract shaped-canvas spectrum. Stella’s 1965–66 “Irregular Polygons” are characterized by boldly colored shapes and outlines that undermine or suppress recognition of the canvas’s literal shape as they create an illusionistic space. In Kelly’s uninflected monochromatic panels, however, drawing appears not on the surface of the painting, but externally, as the outer contour of its shape. As demonstrated in Pentagons and Folded Space, his current exhibition of recent work at Pace, Mangold’s painting often falls between these two extremes. Like Kelly, he works primarily with monochromatic, planar forms; like Stella’s paintings, Mangold’s suggest spatiality. The works in Pentagons and Folded Space synthesize these qualities: though the shapes of the canvases remain legible, they nevertheless seem to move through space, warping, bending, and folding.
The cut-out segments and looping and curving lines characteristic of Mangold’s work from the 2000s and 2010s are absent from the paintings in the current show, which instead continue in the more pared-down manner of the “Plane Structure” series that immediately preceded these new works. Among the paintings in the show, five feature two colors placed side by side, bisecting the canvas vertically. Another four paintings, monochromes, are also bisected but with a thin line in black pencil. Finally, three works are comprised of several canvases, and of these, two are without internal drawing of any sort. Every constituent canvas in each of the multi-panel pieces is monochromatic. Mangold’s palette tends towards earthen tones, and all of the pictures are painted thinly.
The paintings in Pentagons and Folded Space are reticent. I spent a bit of time walking slowly through the show, looking at each work, challenged by them, finding them inscrutable. Gradually, I began to sense the abstract dynamics of Double Pentagon Oxide 2 (2023). The meeting of its two sides, ochre and maroon, ends at a vertex on the bottom boundary. This angle alone yields an architectural effect, as if you were looking into the corner of a room. But this is a fleeting and incomplete sensation, quickly contradicted by following the dividing line to the painting’s top edge, which is straight and flattens the picture plane. The sense of spatiality is persistent, though ambiguous, and its tension is exacerbated by the contrast between the airy facture of the ochre side and the maroon’s richness and solidity, which expands from the pinched bottom edge and looms outward.