Heinz Mack, sculptor and painter, is celebrating his 90th birthday

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Blackout - it was a way of protecting cities from bombing during World War II.

When the Allies started their night air raids on Nazi Germany, they had to turn off the lights and cover the windows.

One has become one with the black of the night, says Heinz Mack in a telephone conversation: "I even had to stick things on my bicycle lamp in such a way that only a tiny ray of light was visible."

As a young person, the artist experienced numerous air raids on his hometown of Krefeld.

That is why the war is burned into his image memory as a “darkroom”.

From gloomy war experiences to the art of brightness

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Heinz Mack will be 90 years old today, March 8th.

Whoever looks at his works will not find the gloom of those years in them.

Rather the opposite is the case: his sculptures, reliefs and pictures combine with attributes such as light, brightness, shine, reflection, transparency and radiance.

With his steles made of light sources and luster materials, his sculptures made of aluminum and Plexiglas, his swinging and rotating objects, and the white reliefs, the artist attracted national and international attention as early as the early 1960s when he was just 30 years old.

But how can such a rapid development from a childhood in the darkness of the war years to a work of brightness be explained?

The exhibition “Mack” in the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf examines this question.

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The air raids had an attractive side as well as a destructive side for the teenager.

“After the bombers had withdrawn, I went out into the street in front of our house and watched the incredible light spectacle from the flak headlights in the sky.

And the whole city was bright, ”reports the artist.

Mack places this experience in direct relation to his later art: "That was my first big experience with light."

"Making the power of light fruitful for my life."

When Heinz Mack started his studies at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf just five years after the end of the war, he only wanted one thing, he says: "To make the power of light fruitful for my life." This had to be translated into practical action and artistic works .

But it took a few more years to get to that point.

Because initially the young artist dealt with the art movements that were in vogue in France after the war.

At the first place of the avant-garde movements was informal art, in which intuitive non-representational painting was elevated to the highest principle.

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At the beginning of his career, Mack created paintings in the informal style of his older colleagues.

But from the beginning of the 1950s he began to experiment with the material light, which was now to become the main actor in his art.

For wooden sculptures such as “The High Grass” or “Large Meadow Piece”, Mack worked with strong indentations and jagged edges, which resulted in strong contrasts between light and shadow.

He wanted to be more radical

But that wasn't radical enough for Mack.

“I wanted to start from scratch and change the world.” He was not alone with this wish.

He found an ally in Otto Piene.

The two idealists moved into a joint studio in Düsseldorf in 1955 - later Günther Uecker also became part of this small group of artists.

From then on, Gladbacher Straße 69 became a think tank for avant-garde art in Europe.

Three years later, "Zero" grew out of it, the art movement that wanted to "transform the world into an unknown new state" with a purist aesthetic, as Otto Piene once explained in an interview.

Always on the move

It was a time of great experimentation.

The Zero artists were not satisfied with small changes in shape.

Zero meant: a zero hour of art should be brought about.

Mack concentrated on the choice of his materials - and he made sure that his objects move in space.

In his text "The new dynamic structure" he formulated a central idea in the year Zero was founded: the vibration of the image.

The eighth evening exhibition in the Mack-Piene Atelier on October 8, 1958 was entitled “Vibrations”.

Mack now constructed objects such as the “White Rotor”, an ensemble of paper that was attached to a disk and moved by electric motors.

He also created huge reliefs made of shiny aluminum and steles with concave mirrors and acrylic glass plates.

To this day, the glistening light, the reflective foils and the rotating movements of the works have lost none of their magic.

This is particularly true of the large-scale works - such as the four by four by four meter moving "light carousel" made of acrylic glass, aluminum and mirrors.

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Such art giants, according to Mack's plan, “should not be a decoration for bourgeois living rooms, but an expression of freedom”.

Zero movement was also political

However, the zero hour did not only refer to art.

The young Zero artists also understood their movement politically: “We were the first to practice the European idea,” says Mack today.

"Zero was an artistic movement that was equally supported by artists from different countries."

Zero spread like wildfire.

Parallel art movements emerged in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Italy and Japan.

The young generation traveled all over Europe.

At the age of 24, Mack traveled to the Sahara

Mack, eager to learn and impatient, pulled it further, at the age of 24 he traveled to the Sahara for the first time.

In a VW he drove to Tunisia via Gibraltar.

As a child he had seen the color photo of a sandstorm in the desert in his father's Brockhaus encyclopedia.

Mack did not travel as a tourist, but as an artist who wanted to “conquer the Sahara as a sculptor”.

There he installed his "Jardin artificiel".

Huge sand reliefs, cubes, mirrors, sails and monumental light steles.

In the endless expanse of the sand, his works, which were documented in photos and in the film, set futuristic accents.

The artist himself, dressed in a shiny aluminum suit, made himself a symbol of a bright future.

For decades, Heinz Mack has set impulses in the art world with his works - because they appeal to the senses and are therefore easily accessible to everyone.

And which artist can claim to have abducted people into a brighter world?

Heinz Mack will take part in the opening of the exhibition, which will be broadcast live on March 8th at 7 p.m. on the Kunstpalast's website (kunstpalast.de).

There you will also find information about registering for visits (from March 10th) and digital tours.

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