The minimalistic art form from the 1960’s to present day
A guest curated show by Kenneth Friedman, President of Kenneth A. Friedman & Co, Los Angeles
Minimalism, largely an American movement in the visual arts rooted in New York City in the late sixties and was defined by extreme simplicity of form and a literal, objective approach.
Minimal art, also called ABC art, is the culmination of reductionist tendencies in modern art that first surfaced in the 1913 composition by the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich consisting of a black square on a white ground. The dominant structures of the minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Tony Smith and Sol Lewitt along with the hard edge paintings of Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland and Al Held grew out of these artists displeasure with Action painting, an arm of American Abstract Expressionism based on intuitive, spontaneous gesture that had dominated American Avant-garde art through much of the 1950s.
The minimalists, who believed that Action painting was too personal and insubstantial, adopted the point of view that a work of art should not refer to anything other than itself. For that reason they attempted to rid their works of any extra visual association. Use of the hard edge, the simple form, and the linear rather than painterly approach was intended to emphasize two-dimensionality and to allow the viewer an immediate, purely visual response. They turned for inspiration to the impassive, quiet works of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, exponents of the colour field branch of Abstract Expressionist painting.
This exhibition presents examples of the Minimalistic art form dating from inception and reaching out into the 21st. century, proving that this once criticized approach to art has developed into a mainstay in Art History.
