Poetically articulate, Distorted Circle is an elegant encapsulation of Mangold’s refined minimalist abstraction. The graceful curve of the soft grey graphite is hand-drawn onto the dusty pink canvas, tracing the circumference of a circle. The circle is drawn ever so slightly off-centre, barely touching or just slipping off the edges of the ever so slightly tilted, rhombus canvas. The subtle incompleteness of the circle divides the canvas into imperfect geometries. Against the muted pink palette, the confines of the grey line and the canvas edge create unresolved arcs, angles and shapes. Mangold’s simple and subtle gesture explores the boundaries of complete form, and the relationship of parts to the whole.

Beginning his career in New York in the early 60s, Mangold’s artistic vocabulary developed against the background of Abstract Expressionism and emerged at the vanguard of American Minimalism. As a student, he was deeply inspired by the Abstract Expressionists, describings artists such as Pollock and Rothko as playing an instrumental role in his own path to abstraction. Recalling his first encounter with these works, Mangold explains, “it showed me how abstract paintings could be something that wasn’t abstract in nature…It was presenting you with an image that was very direct and to your senses, to your emotions. Suddenly it seemed like there was this whole other possibility for abstract thought than I had thought of” (Robert Mangold cited in: ‘Oral history interview with Robert Mangold’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, November 2016, online). Mangold eventually moved to New York after graduating where his job as a guard, and later a library assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, also brought him in close contact with fellow artists such as Robert Ryman and Sol LeWitt, who also worked as guards in the museum. An active member of the artistic community in New York, Mangold’s practice emerged from a fertile ground of artistic exchange and dialogue with fellow artists. Influenced by the pioneering Minimalists of the 60s, the artist transposed the direct emotional appeal of the Abstract Expressionists into his controlled and calculated language of formal geometry, creating his own language of refined expression.

Exploring the boundaries of both completeness and incompleteness, Mangold’s work uses the basic elements of composition - shape, line, and colour - to bring drawing in relation to the edge of the canvas, colour in relation to texture, and shape in relation to space. As Mangold himself described, “the work is a shape, but it’s a shape in relation to the drawn figure in the composition; it’s the marriage of those two things that starts the work in motion - what’s going to be inside and what the outside is going to be, or how the outside works in relation to the inside” (Robert Mangold cited in: Shirly Kaneda, ‘Robert Mangold by Shirly Kaneda’, BOMB, No. 78, July 2001, online). Deceptively simple at first sight, Mangold’s abstractions are thoughtful, literal, steady and sympathetic - they are powerful poetic gestures of the most delicate sensibilities.