One of the key exponents of Minimalism, Robert Mangold has, since the 1950s, probed the structure of the pictorial space, staging precise and systematic explorations of line, colour and shape. Mangold’s paintings consider the space between the real and representational – composed of primary geometric forms, they operate at once as objects and images, complicating our visual distinction between the depicted and the literal. They function as paradoxes: works that, as the artist has noted, resist objecthood, yet engage us architecturally, at a scale calibrated to the human body.Uniting two triangle-shaped canvases with a painted orthogonal shape, A Square Within Two Triangles (1977) stages the tension between symmetry and instability of form. The painting marks one of the central motifs in Mangold’s artistic production from the 1970s. During this period, the artist produced a series of works in which geometric forms are contained within the physical limits of the canvas, extending his investigation of the relationships between adjoining panels across subsequent decades. As Mangold remarked, "I got very interested in the idea that if two things share an edge, you're going to consider them one painting...I was thinking of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, maybe the greatest painting of this century. So, I thought, if I put one kind of structure in this canvas, and another kind in this canvas, and I paint this canvas one way and this one another. Then I started separating them so they were only touching on one point. And I kept trying to figure out how far I could go and still make this dialogue exist" (Robert Mangold, quoted in, R. Shiff, Robert Mangold, New York, 2000, p. 246). Works from this period can be found in a number of museum collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Victoria and the Art Institute of Chicago.