Filmed at Robert Mangold’s upstate New York home and studio in 2011, the artist describes his experiences living and working in New York City in the early 1960s as well as his decision to move to the country later that decade. Mangold’s shift from the city to the country is reflected in his work including the series Walls and Areas (1963) and Curved Areas (1968). Robert Mangold and his wife, painter Sylvia Plimack Mangold, provided images from their personal archive for this video.

Robert Mangold translates the most basic of formal elements—shape, line, and color—into paintings, prints, and drawings whose simplicity of form expresses complex ideas. He renders the surface of each canvas with subtle color modulations and sinewy, hand-drawn graphite lines. Mangold works in multiple series of shaped canvases over many years, exploring variations on rings, columns, trapezoids, arches, and crosses, and compositions without centers.