Green/2 Orange X Painting

Robert Mangold is an American Minimalist painter best known for painted canvases that incorporate drawn line, exalting simplified means and structure. Over the course of the last 50 years, he has employed a variety of geometric forms—circles, ellipses, squares, rectangles, trapezoids—as the support for his pared-down compositions. From 1980 to 1986, the artist created a series of paintings based on the letter X and the plus sign. Green/2 Orange X Painting is composed of three conjoined canvases of unequal size and three distinct colors—two oranges and a green. Drawn lines of unequal length mark the axis of the cross, replicating the overall shape within the plane and unifying the composition. Here the physical presence of the canvas edge becomes the central formal motif; the structural skeleton of painting becomes the subject of the work.