Robert Mangold (b. 1932) was born in North Tonawanda, New York. He began his art studies at the Cleveland Institute of Art before transferring to Yale where he received both his BFA and MFA. In 1961 he married and moved to New York City, taking up a job as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art.
Mangold’s early work consisted largely of monochromatic free-standing constructions displayed against the wall. In the late 60’s he started using acrylic paint and applied it using a roller. As the decade came to a close he started creating shaped canvases playing with subtle shapes and close color relationships. He is known for his economy of geometries in painting, drawing and printmaking. Many have described his work as restrained and quiet, In a 1994 review in Art in America, Robert Kushner wrote that “underneath the composure of their execution, there is an almost romantic vividness of experience. The contrast of this veiled undercurrent and the Apollonian restraint of the presentation make these new paintings both powerful and poignant.”
Rober Mangold’s work is in many museum collections including: The Art Institute of Chicago, the Bonnefantenmuseum (Maastricht, Netherlands), Fundacío La Caixa (Barcelona), the Hallen für Neue Kunst (Schaffhausen, Switzerland), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Trust (Los Angeles), the Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York City), the Tate Collection (London), the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City) among others.