![]() ![]() Through the use of symbolism, precise forms, reduced elements, and thoughtfully-chosen colors, many artists and studios tirelessly work to take an elaborate concept and present it in a straightforward, yet novel, manner. For minimalist artists, the artist’s hand and gesture disappear.Minimalism is an art form that thrives on simplicity – yet it’s anything but simple when it comes to the creative process. These theories had many detractors, especially from the Arte Povera movement, but they unquestionably marked contemporary art, up to conceptual art, which pushed the premise of the domination of the idea over the production even further. The idea is more important than the production process and the signified is more important than the signifier. ![]() They are intentionally cold and neutral, but they call for the reflection of the viewer, who becomes completely involved in the artistic process. Their works are revealing of the surrounding space that they come to include as a determining element. The work and the thinking of minimalist artists deal first of all with the perception of objects and their relation to space. Minimalism is the art of the visible, without any compromise. What should we think of Stella’s great monochromes? Do they qualify as paintings? Not at all, because these works give the impression of plates. His radical text confirms Judd very quickly as the undisputed forerunner of the movement, but he refutes the term.ĭonald Judd, Stack Minimalism, art of visible without concession: His text, a major essay that marked contemporary art, claims that modernity’s most representative art form is neither painting nor sculpture, but a new virtual medium, “the tridimensional work” as we have already stated, his position is quite contrary to Greenberg’s principles. At the time he had his first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York in 1964, Judd had already abandoned painting in favour of the creation of various objects. The art form that arises from this complex movement is the result of a tridimensional work that skillfully blends painting and sculpture to become “specific objects”, to use the term employed by Donald Judd in his 1965 manifesto, “Specific Objects”. If traditional painting seems to be permanently abandoned, and not without reason, sculpture in the round is not the ultimate recourse of minimalism, although they are pretty closely connected. M inimalism is therefore no longer minor art, it is a form of art more deeply rooted in reality. These artists previously fought against the perpetration of painting as the only possible and adequate vehicle to art and proposed to substitute the element of illusion to which painting is necessarily subjected (unlike photography for example) with real things in real space. While the use of rather cheap materials and a the unpretentious presentation of the works justifies the term chosen by Wolheim, the forerunners of minimalism don’t profess an art of reduction, but rather reinterpret modern art’s great idea to eliminate the composition, in order to create an art that is certainly less spectacular, but more unitary and more true. Minimalism or the abandonment of composition A Cartesian movement pushed to the extreme, preaching that everything there is to see is what can be seen. There’s an absence of feelings in minimalism, shared by artists such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre, or Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt, even if the latters’ relationship with the movement is not that close. So, minimalist artists should rather be placed in the lineage of Malevich and Ad Reinhardt’s Ultimate Paintings. These paths lead only into painting.” That’s right, minimalism comes as a reaction to the colorful sentimental excesses of abstract expressionism. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. He is interested in the necessities of painting Frank Stella’s painting is not symbolic. ![]() ![]() Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. The description of Frank Stella’s works made by Carl Andre explains one of the facets of minimalism: “ Art excludes the unnecessary. ![]()
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