CategoriesStyles and Movements
Minimalism
Art of the 1960s, mostly sculpture made in New York, reduced to simple geometric units, industrial materials and plain repetition.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Minimalism are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Minimalism took shape in New York in the early and mid-1960s as a reaction against the personal gesture of Abstract Expressionism. Its artists wanted objects that were simply what they were, with no hidden meaning and no visible hand. Frank Stella's black stripe paintings of 1959 pointed the way.
Look for boxes, bricks, tiles and tubes, often industrially fabricated and arranged in grids or rows. Donald Judd, who preferred the phrase 'specific objects', stacked identical metal boxes up the wall. Carl Andre laid bricks and metal plates flat on the floor, to be walked on. Dan Flavin worked with standard fluorescent tubes, beginning with the diagonal of May 25, 1963. Sol LeWitt built open modular cubes and wrote instructions for wall drawings that others could execute, and Robert Morris made large, plain grey forms. Such works change with the room and the viewer's position, pointing towards installation art.
Related artists
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