Herbert Zangs Œuvres 1952-1959

“Herbert Zangs is a phenomenon”: so went the reputation of an artist who for a long time avoided the classifications of art history. It was between 1952 and 1959 that this painter invented his “white work,” whitewashing everything he could find: recycled objects, tissue or brown paper, bits of wood, cardboard boxes, fabrics, metal rails. “White sticks to an object like snow to a landscape,” he would say.
The catalog of the exhibition Œuvres 1952-1959, which was presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 1995, focuses in particular on this white period, up until the first black works appeared in 1958. Texts by Erich Franz and Susannah Cremer-Bermbach look back at the atypical path of this “monochrome pioneer.”