Paul Mogensen
Minimal artist Paul Mogensen developed as a painter during the mid-to-late 1960s, joining contemporaries such as Brice Marden and David Novros in using form and color to reduce painting to its essential elements. Based on the application of mathematical principles and rational systems, Mogensen’s early works are geometric arrangements that imply infinite progression. Using modular, monochrome canvas units to set up a fundamentally important relationship of space and color, Mogensen employed a reduction approach, eliminating gesture, image, and many preconceived ideas about the purpose of painting. All non-essential elements are done away with to the extent that the form and color are “concentrated to a certain point, leaving out all remaining elements.” What remains is a balance of form and color in elemental progressions common to both science and art. The canvas becomes almost a “delivery device” to support color and composition, emphasizing the independent nature of the parts within each work and underscoring their individuality. In this way a tension is created between the discrete parts and the objects as a whole. For example, Untitled (1967) is based on the geometric proportion of the golden section, which can be expressed in a line or rectangle that is divided into …
Minimal artist Paul Mogensen developed as a painter during the mid-to-late 1960s, joining contemporaries such as Brice Marden and David Novros in using form and color to reduce painting to its essential elements. Based on the application of mathematical principles and rational systems, Mogensen’s early works are geometric arrangements that imply infinite progression. Using modular, monochrome canvas units to set up a fundamentally important relationship of space and color, Mogensen employed a reduction approach, eliminating gesture, image, and many preconceived ideas about the purpose of painting. All non-essential elements are done away with to the extent that the form and color are “concentrated to a certain point, leaving out all remaining elements.” What remains is a balance of form and color in elemental progressions common to both science and art. The canvas becomes almost a “delivery device” to support color and composition, emphasizing the independent nature of the parts within each work and underscoring their individuality. In this way a tension is created between the discrete parts and the objects as a whole. For example, Untitled (1967) is based on the geometric proportion of the golden section, which can be expressed in a line or rectangle that is divided into two unequal parts, where the ratio of the smaller part to the greater part is the same as the ratio of the greater part to the whole. Mogensen’s golden section is made up of six separate white panels joined together (the sections are not drawn or painted on the canvas). The square panels are unified by their color and their connection to the overall rectangular form, a single “rectangle of ‘pushed together rectangles’” Mogensen’s work extends the aesthetic postulate of the golden section through a series of subdivisions.
Mogensen has had solo exhibitions at venues such as Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Wiener Secession in Vienna, and Mary Boone Gallery in New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions at nationally at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Cincinnati Museum of Art, Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College in New York, Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Georgia Museum of Art at University of Georgia in Athens, and Krannert Art Museum at University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, among other institutions.
Courtesy of MOCA