Lisson Gallery

In 1973 Robert Mangold and Dan Flavin were given inaugural London shows at Lisson Gallery. Mangold went on to have seven more solo shows at the gallery, including this one at Whitfield Street in 1981.

The art historian Robert Storr wrote about Mangold in his 2000 publication 'Betwixt and Between': "The constancy of Mangold’s concerns defies conventional notions of artistic growth and change. There are no radical breaks in his work; instead there is a process of gradually shifting focus, coming on the heels of long periods of intense concentration on a limited set of variables. 'What happens to me', the artist explained, 'is that I seem to go back and forth. I go a certain distance this way, then I have to go back and reconnect with what I lost. Things are always going in and coming out and going back in funny ways. I have to trust my nervousness. Then I just have to go back and check and figure out whether it’s a real thing I am feeling'. The consequence is paintings that are ‘timeless’ not in a metaphysical sense, but in the sense of being hard to correlate with any identifiable cycle within the artist’s career or any particular turn of the stylistic wheel in the art world generally. Frank Stella’s work is easily dated; each episode within it is formally self-contained and the sequence is logical. Altogether his output is a dramatisation of the myth of avant-garde rupture and continuity. Frequently doubling back upon itself, Mangold’s work confounds such clear-cut compartmentalisation; no story is told by the addition of paintings, though addition does amplify and nuance the concepts and qualities manifest in his production. 'I don’t think that if I dropped a painting from 1965 into a new exhibition it would look out of place', Mangold once commented, and it is true – almost”.

- Robert Storr, 'Betwixt and Between', Robert Mangold, London: Phaidon, 2000, p.99