artBahrain.org

THE BAHRAIN Financial Harbour opened a gallery at the beginning of this year with the aim of promoting Bahrain’s ambitious plans to develop into the art capitol of the Gulf region. The gallery thus hopes to act as a platform for presenting international art to a broad public and for mediating an insight into the local art scene. Whereby one aspect stands in the foreground, the fact that art is without borders, that artists from all parts of the world-regardless of their national and cultural origin-have always mutually influenced and cross-fertilized each other. In this encounter with the art of other cultures, the gallery sees an opportunity to expand our customary viewpoints and aesthetic possibilities and hopes to establish itself as a site where there is an exchange between the artists themselves as well as between the artists and their public.

Thus was born the idea to show a European artist whose art has been significantly influenced by the Orient as one of the first exhibitions in Bahrain Financial Harbour. Over the centuries, an ongoing and active intellectual and artistic exchange between the Orient and the Occident has existed. The impact of an increasingly reciprocal influence can be especially seen at the turn of the 19^th century. While the West discovered abstract painting, the artists in the East identified with figurative painting. Without contact with European art, modern and contemporary art in oriental countries could not have evolved, while, vice versa, the development of abstract art in Europe would not be imaginable without the influence of oriental and Islamic art. Henri Matisse, Paul Klee and Eugène Delacroix are among the famous artists whose work reflects their impressions of journeys to the Orient. It was particularly the colours and the light of the Orient that moved them.

One of the contemporary artists whose work has for long been influenced by the Islamic orient is Heinz Mack, one of the world’s major artists. He was a visionary very early on, seeking new ways to artistic expression. ”My repeated encounters with Oriental culture go back half a century, and I have neither been able nor willing to resist its influence,” he once wrote.

His sources of inspiration were Arabic calligraphy, the artful arabesques of Islamic ornamentation, the miniatures, and the cupola design of Persian mosques. They incited him to create reliefs of light in the form of Kufic script, for example, or large-scale paintings in the luminous colours and patterns of oriental carpets. A comprehensive exhibition at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin entitled “Transit”, which took place at the end of 2006/beginning of 2007 and attracted more than 120,000 visitors, showed impressively how the fascination and inspiration of Islamic culture was taken up in Mack’s work from the years 1950 to 2006. “What’s crazy,” Mack said in an interview, “is that I have painted many motifs often independently of any predecessors, that I often didn’t discover till later the ‘predecessors’ to my works, that a period of time lay between them.”

Light subsequently became Mack’s central theme. Light and the resulting colour spectrum are the basic elements of his art. Like no other artist since the Impressionists, since Robert Delaunay or Laszló Moholy-Nagy, Mack has been occupied with the elemental phenomenon of light. Light, to which nature owes its existence and the world its visuality. Light as a prerequisite of all manifestation, as creative potentiality. Light as transformer, as something that penetrates the object and dematerialises it. Light in its manifested forms but also as a symbol of the divine.

“My works only ‘live’ when they have ‘their’ light, the ‘right’ light, because they are objects of light, instruments of light and an expression of light’s energy.” Light likewise plays a crucial role in painting, a medium that he at times consciously neglected but took up again in the 1990s. “Painting has always fascinated me as long as it is filled with light. But painting also means a lot more to me. It is the foreground to the endlessly deep black space in which light and colour become inseparably one. The identity of light and colour, which become visible in the spectrum, is the subject matter of my painting…and this is actually its only subject. I love the purity of colours, I love the light within the colours!“

In order to fulfill his ideas, Mack needs space, i.e., room for his imagination and dreams. Spaces for him are the sky, the sea, the Antarctic, the desert. To him the most relevant space is the desert, an infinite space, open, deep and without boundaries. To Mack the desert is not only a real-time space, but also the virtual space of his dreams. It stands vast, light-filled and pristine. His Sahara Project from the 1960s has been much regarded in the world. Mack travelled several times to the African desert, the first time in 1962/63, in order to test, and experiment with, his ideas on the power of light using his own technical means. Objects such as Plexiglas steles, sun rotors, mirrored cubes, mirrored walls, concave mirrors, sails of aluminium foil, or sculpture of polished brass, all of which he built and set into the desert, has allowed him to experience spectacular light phenomena in nature’s vastness. He built wings and fans and lattices made up of thousands of prisms in which light breaks and reflects the colours of the sand and the sky. He observes, films and photographs how light falls onto different objects, how it then fractures and constantly changes the object and surrounding space. On one of his visits to the desert, the film “Tele Mack” was shot and is being shown at the exhibition.

Mack has carried out similar experiments in the Antarctic. In his works, Mack overcomes the usual boundaries between painting and sculpture. The German philosopher Max Bense (1910-1990) writes in the book Mack - Art in the Desert (Josef Keller Verlag, Starnberg 1969): "Even the space which Mack includes in the Sahara Project becomes a medium for aesthetic states, innovations created out of light, which by vibration, concentration and reflection is given over to a freedom of design, of a selection that, beyond Kandinsky, no longer speaks only of the emancipation of colour and form but of the emancipation of light.

Finally to the objects themselves: the stele, the mirrored walls, the sails, the glass panes, the sand reliefs. They are the carriers of the aesthetic states that transmit the endless equiprobable labyrinth of the desert, its space, light, singular discontinuity, interruption, visual innovation, improbability and information. As I said: artificially built carriers on the one hand, but, on the other, in the role of symbols that, via chaos and labyrinth, engender orientation, order, that is, aesthetic effectiveness. The aesthetic state that interests Mack is not bound to the carrier like a painting to a canvas or a sculpture to a metal or marble body. The aesthetic state appears here more like a shell around the carrier that includes sand, light and space; the carrier does not manifest the aesthetic state but sets it in motion. It is this function of the carrier that first constitutes the intended aesthetic state as a truly ‘artificial space’ as Mack calls it, and as a ‘reservation of art’ as he adds....“ Mack himself said about his Sahara Project: “[…] almost everything that we gave over to the light and the desert as an artistic challenge was transposed, became an expression of light, space and time...“

This coming March, Mack will turn 80. This round number offers an occasion to honour his work in many places in the world via exhibitions and retrospectives. After Bahrain, a comprehensive show will open in the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn, followed by other exhibitions in Düsseldorf at the Museum Kunstpalast, at Galerie Beck & Eggeling as well as at the County Museum in Los Angeles, to name only a few stations. It is a great exception and a great delight that Heinz Mack, his wife Ute and the Galerie Beck & Eggeling have made it possible for a large range of major works, paintings and sculptures to be brought to Bahrain and that his Excellency Shaikh Rashid Bin Khalifa Al Khalifa and Dr. Omar Al Mardi, Managing Director of Bahrain Financial Harbour with his team, Lina Mubarak and Yasmin Sharabi, have agreed to show this delightful presentation at Bahrain’s Financial Harbour to an international public. The exhibition presents an array of some of the artist’s loveliest works in which we are given a sense of the influence of the Orient and the desert and in which an idea is conveyed of the interaction between colour and light as well as between colour, light and space.

Mack recently said: “The older I become the better I understand that it is not art which is the wonder, but human beings as a part of nature […]?For me the power of vision is much stronger than that of the power of thought. Maybe all art is pure vision and therefore close to God. This is one of the most wonderful things about light; it makes the smallest and the largest things in the universe equally visible. The secrets, the mysteries, the wonders revealed through art are shown on its surface.?That which is hidden beneath, is hidden beneath the surface...“

In 1958 Heinz Mack, together with Otto Piene, founded the legendary group ZERO, which Günther Ücker joined in 1961. ZERO is considered to be the most influential and, for art history, the most important avant-garde movement since 1945 and was the intellectual starting point for Mack to try out and execute his visions and new ideas.

© Karin Adrian von Roques 2011