When Herbert Zangs entered the art scene the discourse and exhibition practice was by and large focused on abstract expressionism in the USA and Art Informel, its European counterpart, an artistic practice first described by the French critic Michel Tapié in his 1952 book “Un Art Autre”. Tachisme and lyrical abstraction are based on highly informal procedures. The application of paint is characterised by gestural movements. In Germany informal art first came into the picture with the Quadriga Group formed by Karl Otto Götz, Otto Greis, Heinz Kreutz and Bernard Schultze in 1952. In Düsseldorf the Gruppe 53 followed similar ideas. Peter Brüning, Karl Fred Dahmen, Winfred Gaul and Gerhard Hoehme were among the artists associated with the Gruppe 53, as well as Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, who would in 1959 found the Zero Group. Art Informel dissolves the form in a painterly way. The application of paint in free sweeping gestures would bear witness to the inner impulses of the artist. As a result, his emotion or state of mind would be transferred to the painting and could be read by the viewer.
Zangs takes a different position. In his foldings and relief paintings, which he creates as of 1953, Zangs permeates the picture by way of actual movement. The picture itself opens up into space. With this radical approach Herbert Zangs extends the dissolution of the genre of painting, which the artists of Art Informel set in motion. The profundity of this disruption of the conventional concept and function of painting is comparable to Lucio Fontana’s cutting of the two-dimensional, static picture plane and the transformation of the painting’s disrupted unity into an object in space.
Zangs’s artworks instantly convey the artist’s active and intense approach to the materiality of his art objects. In doing so he is led by intuition rather than a set concept. His works oscillate between painting and object. One senses the artist’s ambivalent position between creating structure and rhythm on the one hand and an almost non-existent artistic arrangement and alignment on the other hand. This dual nature results in a poetic lineament of serial structures, order and rhythmic spatial forms which contrast with the impression of dissonance and inconsistency that is caused by the inherent imperfections of Herbert Zangs’s works.
Zangs succeeds in abandoning the traditional easel painting as early as the beginning of the 1950ies. Not just his whitened objets trouvés and assemblages, but likewise his relief paintings und foldings that are often presented in simple glazed showcases can be considered as objects.
The artwork does not illustrate something, but the materials embody nothing but themselves. The painting turns into an object, a tangible item on the wall composed out of various materials.
Chaos and order are the two opposing poles that characterise the oeuvre of Herbert Zangs. His works come into being as a result of the struggle for balance between action on the one side and formal order and serial structure on the other side. It is this inherent polarity from which his art derives its vigour as well as its quiet allure. There is an inherent poetic trait to the whitened assemblages of dumped objects of everyday life – clothes pegs, yarn bobbins, discarded suitcases, kitchen appliances, tools, cloth, planks of wood, bizarre compositions translated into abstraction and disconnected from reality, yet still attached to their former context as history and function shimmers through the opaque coat of white dispersion paint.
In the mid 1950ies and 1960ies Herbert Zangs creates work groups in which he evolves structure and rhythmical order in the form of cells, grooves and ridges that he wrests from the paint by using unconventional methods of application or from the physical surface of the support itself by folding, knotting or treating it in various ways. These works earned him recognition in the art scene as a prime protagonist of the European avant-garde right until he decides to relocate his residency to the South of France in 1962 and travel the world in the ensuing years until the mid 1970ies.
At first sight certain characteristics of Zangs oeuvre may suggest a closer association with the Zero movement, such as the use of monochrome, serial structures and the use of unusual materials as well as a radical openness to unconventional artistic practices. However, working in serial structures is never practiced by Zangs in the aim to accomplish a precision and order in his composition that he would plan and calculate prior to an artwork’s execution. Inter alia this can be observed in Zangs’s relief paintings. The patterns the thickly applied dispersion paint show are a structure Zangs imposes in an attempt to establish an aligned system, however, rhythm and symmetry are disrupted as the structure of horizontal or vertical lines is irregular, imperfect and disconnected in some places.
Beyond this aspect Zangs is not interested in optical effects, which also clearly separates him from the artists of the Zero movement. His understanding and use of white as colour is a far cry from the idea of an aesthetic zero point founded on a rational scientific concept.
Reflecting on the position the oeuvre of Herbert Zangs takes in the avant-garde during the 1950ies and 1960ies a certain nearness to Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) can be observed. Manzoni, also a solitary figure that anticipated future developments, influenced the generation of Italian artists that gather around the art critic Germano Celant as of 1967, who coined the term Arte Povera for their work. From 1957 until his early death in 1963 Manzoni made more than 600 achromes, monochromatic painting-like objects made of china-clay on canvas which form a large part of his body of works. Manzoni soaks the canvas in china clay rather than applying it by way of a brush or directly by hand. The material, that is applied without controlled intervention by the artist, develops wrinkle-like patterns and creases in the process drying. The term achrome denotes the total absence of colour. This minimalist approach of Manzoni speaks of his interest in the materiality of the art object. Ultimately Manzoni aimed at creating art that does not include any references beyond its mere, immediate materiality.
In its singularity and its complex nature with opposing traits the oeuvre of Herbert Zangs counts among the most exciting and rewarding discoveries to be made in the decade before the Zero and Arte Povera movements evolved.
As the artist did not care for professional commercial exploitation of his works on the art market , his oeuvre is predominately a household name with a fairly small circle of collectors. Following his international acclaim in the late 1950ies Herbert Zangs almost fell into oblivion. A nenewed discovery and perception sets in during the 1990ies after the exhibition “Das offene Bild” in 1993 at the Westfälische Landesmuseum in Münster and the solo shows at Sprengel Museum, Hannover in 1985 and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris in 1995 as well as a retrospective at the Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg in 1998.
Works by Herbert Zangs are in numerous important private and public collections. In acknowledgment of the innovative power and significance of Zangs’s body of works the artist enters the limelight again in recent years in exhibitions on mid-century abstration and likewise on the art market.
