Minimalism

also: Minimal art · ABC art

movement late 1950s-early 1970s United States North America

Minimalism - also called minimal art - stripped 1960s American art down to the object itself. Reacting against the emotional rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism and the visible hand of the artist, its painters and sculptors made plain geometric forms in repeated units: Donald Judd's stacked metal boxes, Carl Andre's floor grids of metal plates, Dan Flavin's fluorescent fixtures, Sol LeWitt's open structures, Agnes Martin's faint grids. Frank Stella's black paintings of the late 1950s are often taken as the start. Fabricated industrially and finished anonymously, the works deny metaphor, illusion and hierarchy - 'what you see is what you see', in Stella's phrase. Meaning shifts from the art object to the viewer's bodily encounter with scale, space and sequence. The label repelled some of the artists themselves, but minimalism reset the terms of sculpture and of installation art to come.

Untitled (1988-1991) — by Donald Judd, concrete sculpture . In the Billy Rose Art Garden at the Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, Israel.
Untitled (1988-1991) — by Donald Judd, concrete sculpture . In the Billy Rose Art Garden at the Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, Israel.CC BY-SA 4.0 (credit: Talmoryair) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Geometric, serial forms: repeated modules, grids, stacks and progressions
  • Industrial materials and fabrication: sheet metal, plywood, plexiglass, fluorescent light, concrete
  • No illusion, gesture or hierarchy - the work presents itself literally
  • Neutral surfaces, hard edges and machine finish; the artist's touch suppressed
  • The viewer's bodily experience of scale, space and sequence becomes the subject

Key figures

  • Frank Stella (1936-2024) — Black paintings of the late 1950s catalysed the movement: 'what you see is what you see'
  • Donald Judd (1928-1994) — Theorist-maker of 'specific objects': stacks, progressions and boxes in industrial materials
  • Carl Andre (1935-2024) — Floor sculptures of repeated metal units that resculpt the room
  • Dan Flavin (1933-1996) — Fluorescent light fixtures used as sculpture
  • Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) — Serial structures and wall drawings ruled by stated instructions

Example works

  • Die Fahne hoch! — Frank Stella (1959)
  • Equivalent VIII — Carl Andre (1966)
  • 144 Magnesium Square — Carl Andre (1969)

Sources

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