Mangold, Robert

Robert Mangold was born in 1937 and spent his youth in Buffalo, New York. In 1956 he enrolled in the illustration department of the Cleveland Institute of Art. Within a year, he had transferred to the fine-arts division of the school in order to pursue an education in painting, sculpture, and drawing.  After graduating in 1959, he was awarded a fellowship to attend the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, Connecticut, and in the fall of 1960 he entered the graduate program at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven. There, he experimented with a variety of stylistic idioms.  By 1964 Mangold had moved into his signature Minimalist painting style. His first solo exhibition, entitled Walls and Areas, was held at the Fischbach Gallery in 1965. In 1965–66, the Jewish Museum, New York, mounted the first major exhibition of Minimalist painting, which included Mangold’s work. Mangold became an instructor in the fine-arts department of the School of Visual Arts, New York, in the mid-1960s.

In 1968 Mangold began employing acrylic instead of oil paint, rolling rather than spraying it on masonite or plywood grounds. Within the year, he moved from these more industrially oriented supports to canvas. He received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1969.  Major museum exhibitions of his work have been held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1971), the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (1974), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1982), Hallen für Neue Kunst in Schaffhausen (1993), and Musée D’Orsay in Paris (2006). His recent series—which utilize elemental forms like the column and ring and employ his characteristic economy of color, gesture and shape—are featured frequently at PaceWildenstein in New York, as well as other international galleries.