Mack’s first sculptures date back to the early 1950s when he was still a student. The artist believed that the unavoidable destiny for a painter is to become a sculptor, even though the objects he produces are immaterial in their essence. The term sculpture was used by the artist quite freely, as he attributed it to works made with a wide range of media and techniques. Mack’s aim is to create a “real light phenomena” through sculpture, as he states: “My sculptures are new objects in space, reflections of light and instruments of motion… sculpture without light is only dead material”.

'Lamellar Sculpture with Eight Saw Blades', 1954, was produced prior to the beginnings of the ZERO group. The artist – who grew up 500 miles from the coastline in the middle of Germany – made this work at the age of 23, after seeing the sea for the first time in Bordeaux. This vision of a seascape is almost at odds with the rawness of the rusted metal, the serrated edges of the blades suggesting movement, like the waves of the sea. The fact that the saw blades used to cut the wood block, have then been incorporated back into the block itself, lends the piece a neatly circular logic. Although Mack’s sculptures at the beginning of his career are rarer and less classifiable into a specific category, elements of Lamellar Sculpture with Eight Saw Blades are clearly visible in some of the the artist’s works that appeared in the following years, especially from the Pillars series such as Sculpture for the Heaven.