Category: Art & Illustration

Color Light

Color Light is a DVD that transitions through the entire color spectrum in a 20-minute time span, with the possibility of pausing on a specific color to provide a certain kind of background light or set a mood.

The work of Japanese studio Kyouei Design – which often creates whimsical, curious products – what Color Light does is surprisingly simple and lush in its infinite possibilities.

The photograph illustrates a beautiful installation in the Shizuoka Prefectual Museum of Art, but I can easily imagine it as the minimalist decoration of a swanky party.

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Larry Bell

Larry Bell has had a long and varied career, and also influential enough to land himself on the cover of The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Born in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois, and now based in Toas, New Mexico and Venice, California, his earliest work were, like Donald Judd, Abstract-expressionist paintings.

In the 1960s, Bell began making some of his most recognisable works: Cube structures that sit on transparent plinths. Three of these works were featured in the influential 1966 minimalist exhibition Primary Structures, which also featured the work of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Ellsworth Kelly, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt (amongst others).

I often see people disregard the relationship between the plinth and a sculpture, and furthermore the plinth’s sculptural presence. It’s always refreshing to look at Bell’s work, because he brings an awareness to the plinth by making it part of the work itself.

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Donald Judd Woodblock Prints

Donald Judd (1928-1994) was a minimalist sculptor that we admire here at Minimalissimo. Whilst he is perhaps best known for his strictly geometrical sculptures and installations, he also worked as a printmaker, a side of his career which seems to be lesser-known.

Working mainly with woodblock prints, these works share the same keen eye for composition, form and color as his sculptural works, except that they are, of course, reduced to 2D.

I think the relationship between these works and his three-dimensional works is interesting.  Side by side they seem like sketches or mockups for his sculpture, but on their own they can definitely be appreciated as fully formed, beautiful graphics.

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Carl Andre

American minimalist artist, Carl Andre (1935) is known for his geometrical arrangement of commercial and natural materials such as bricks, blocks and plates.

His most significant contribution was to distance sculpture from processes of carving, modeling, or constructing, and to make works that simply involved sorting and placing.

Andre has sought to renegociate conventions of display, forcing a dialogue between the object and its surrouding.

Carl Andre has received this year the Switzerland’s 2011 Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Prize.

I love it because the artist does not want his sculptures to have a fixed view point, but to be experienced as more than areas or paths.

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Zips

Barnett Newman, an American-based painter who lived from 1905 – 1970, is linked predominately to the New York Abstract Expressionist school. Even more than Mark Rothko somber coloristic paintings, Newman’s work is perhaps the most minimal of the Abstract Expressionists, as he was strongly involved in color field or monochromatic painting.

His paintings are trademarked by what Newman called “zips”. These are painted lines on canvasses of block colors that define the spacial structure of his painting. One of his best known works is Vir Heroicus Sublimis (“The Sublime is Now”) from 1950-1. When it was first exhibited, Newman wrote:

There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.

These “zips” were also actualised in 3-dimensional forms, such as The Wild (1950).

See some of his work at the Museum of Modern Art for their Abstract Expressionist New York exhibition that runs until April 25, 2011.

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Cloud Gate

Minimalism is the official language of public sculpture and public memorials.

The Indian-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor (1954) lets art and architecture show off.

His sculpture is in many ways one long ode to the minimalist monochrome and its emphasis on simplicity and purity, but he has also explored different materials such as fibreglass and reflective metal surface to create organic forms that mirror the viewer.

I love his wildly popular Cloud Gate, an enormous, shiny, pillowlike archway at Millennium Park in Chicago. So if you are in the city, check it out yourself!

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Untitled (Golden)

Untitled (Golden) is a 1995 installation by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996), an artist born in Cuba who lived and worked in New York.

Consisting of strands of beads that fall from a hanging device to the floor, the work functions as a membrane that intersects a room and defines new spaces in the process.

Of the work, Lauren Hinkson says:

The gentle confrontation of this golden screen provokes the tactile and sensory, inviting the viewer to transform its shape simply by walking through.

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Sol LeWitt at Gladstone Gallery

Gladstone Gallery recently presented an exhibition of large-scale installations by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), an American artist primarily linked to the Conceptual Art movement on the 1960s and ’70s, but his influence on minimalism is undeniable.

Of Wall Drawing #792 (conceived in 1995), Gladstone Gallery says:

It underscores LeWitt’s early interest in the intersections between art and architecture, which he distinguished and admired as a practice structured by predetermination, empirical logic, and collaboration.

What an absolutely gorgeous work.

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Nothing

Voids, an entire exhibition devoted to the art of nothing.

A retrospective of empty exhibitions since that of Yves Klein (1928-1962) in 1958, who invited thousands to view an empty, white-washed room.

This exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris was in 2009 one of the most radical show ever seen inside a museum. Stretched through nine rooms, completely empty, each one was the work of an artist from the past fifty years.

The best explaination of the show came from the curators themselves:

Bringing together propositions by Yves Klein, Robert Irwin, Laourie Parsons, Roman Ondak, Bethan Huws, Maria Eichhorn, Robert Berry and Art & Language, this very special retrospective includes only exhibitions that presented a completely space, gallery or museum.

It casts light on an element in art history that has long been neglected because it represents a challenge not only to the museums but also to the art market. At the same time it raises a number of questions, such as what is an exhibition? or the possibility to revive ephemeral works, known only through documentation and the memories of those who witnessed it?

An extreme minimalist experience, a refreshing reprieve to have so much room for contemplation, free for a moment to think about what we are going to do…

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Lines

I think the most successful artists that work with sculpture and installation are those that address and involve their work in a highly considered conversation with space. In my opinion, there are few others who do this as well as Fred Sandback (1943-2003), an American artist who was renown for his strictly geometrical yarn sculptures, prints and drawings.

Writing about his first experiences using yarn, Sandback says:

The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire, was the outline of a rectangular solid—a 2 x 4 inch—lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me. I could assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it.

And on the use of straight lines:

The line is a means to mediate the quality or timbre of a situation, and has a structure which is quick and abstract and more or less thinkable, but it’s the tonality or, if you want, wholeness of a situation that is what I’m trying to get at.

Much like the work of Margaret Roberts, Sandback’s work proves how drastic an intervention of something as subtle as string can have on the perception of space.

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