Robert Mangold was born on October 12, 1937 in North Tonawanda, New York to a working-class family. A childhood interest in art culminated in him attending the Cleveland Institute of Art, graduating in 1961. Two years later, he graduated from Yale University with an MFA. His work was first exhibited in 1965 at the Jewish Museum. Soon after he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, followed by a solo museum exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. With his status secured, Mangold has been featured in many other museum exhibitions around the world, has won major public commissions, and has works in collections in top international museum collections.
Mangold’s style has always been categorized as minimalist. In his early career, Mangold experimented with minimalism in its purest form – monochromatic works. By the 1970s, Mangold began to add a few more elements, such as the introduction of shaped canvases, and added overlapping shapes into his works, but still remained a dedicated minimalist in his aesthetic. In 1972, Mangold made his first prints, and continued to make them throughout his career, in a similarly minimalist style. He now lives in Washingtonville, New York and continues to paint and make art.