Robert Mangold
Paula Cooper Gallery | 529 West 21st Street
Robert Mangold has made five daring new objects, a hybrid species of painting and relief sculpture. These painted, shaped canvases are hung like paintings and stand out a bit uncomfortably from the wall by declaring it. Each of them consists of two panels joined together (a mode of presentation that has become a popular post-Modern conceit), a pair of irregular quadrilateral shapes juxtaposed in intimate yet uneasy coexistence. In four of these works, one panel is a painting with an ellipse inscribed on its surface, while the other is a painted “frame” with a not-quite-diamond-shaped opening