Category: Painting

Luca Brandi

Born in Florence, Italy in 1961, abstract painter Luca Brandi has produced a wonderful collection dating from 2001-2011.

Inspired from a very early age whilst working in various churches in the city of Florence, Brandi studied under Paolo Galletti, who taught the theories on the separation of geometric form through painting and colour. After studying the works of Richard Serra, Brice Marden and Frank Stella, Brandi discovered a passion for minimalist art. He then began working on new works based on the layering of metallic colours that are still the basis of his work today.

Brandi explains:

I eliminate as much as I can to express the beauty of the human spirit. Due to this, I often use metallic colours, in an attempt to bring the spectator to meditate through colour, materials, reflection, and silence.

→ Watch a video of his works on display

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Greg Bogin

Born in 1965 in New York, Greg Bogin‘s artwork is clean and minimal with a synthetic feel.

His canvases are irregularly shaped and in full or partially by intensely bright colors. Artistically, he is oriented towards Minimal and Pop Art.

I love it.

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Callum Innes

Callum Innes is currently exhibiting a small collection of new paintings at Jensen Gallery in Paddington, Sydney.

Innes is a Scottish-based painter and a former Turner Prize nominee (Damien Hirst won the Turner Prize the year Innes was nominated). His new collection of paintings are canvases divided into two halves, with two different approaches or techniques of painting to either half. Often one half is glossy, whilst the other is quite textural from the surface of the canvas. From my observations, it appeared that many different layers of paint were painted on top of each other, so the resulting surface had hints of the colour from the paint applied underneath. A minimal result, but a seemingly laborious process.

The exhibition of Innes’ new paintings opened on the 8th of March and runs until the 21st of April. The textures of Innes’ painting are difficult to perceive from the documentation of his work. They must really be seen in person.

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Pierre Soulages

Abstract minimalist artist Pierre Soulages (1919) is also called the painter of black. He sees light as a matter to work with. Striating the black surface of his paintings enables him to make the light reflect, and allows the black to come out from darkness and into brightness. Black becomes a luminous colour.

Pierre Soulages says:

I like the authority of black. It’s an uncompromising colour. A violent colour, but one that encourages internalisation. Both a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens up a mental field all of its own.

Honoured in 2010 by having painting exhibited in the Louvre and a major retrospective of his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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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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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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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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Grids

A beautiful collection of paintings by Lauren McCartney, which were completed for her honours at UOW for an exhibition called Multiple Personality Order. These paintings are made up of tiny grids that from a distance look very abstracted, but on closer inspection are actually tightly structured and meticulously composed. Her sculptural pieces, Three Cubes, appear as if one of the squares have jumped off the canvas and into a 3-dimensionality. Of her work, McCartney says:

The body of work in Multiple Personality Order is an exploration of colour, light and space through the repetition of brushstrokes set in place by the grid. The title refers to the balance between order and chaos, between the mechanical repetition of the grid and the unpredictable nature of gesture.

Repetition and rhythm are the basis for the composition of my paintings. My works use the grid as a guide for the structure of the finished painting, although I don’t let the grid restrict the brushstrokes, instead a subtle overlap of lines occurs as I allow the combination of the rhythmic and spontaneous actions of painting to be the dominant outcome.

Photography by Boni Cairncross.

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Dieter Villinger

Born in Germany in 1947, artist Dieter Villinger has made a career in making large monochromatic paintings conscious of their physicality and the spacial relationship between them and the environment in which they’re installed.

Of his work, Michael Hübl states:

By defining his paintings as objects, declaring them individual pieces, Villinger is making an indirect statement about the consistency and the presence of his paintings. Villinger’s colour objects are bodies, not surfaces.

Although difficult to see in these photographs, Villinger’s paintings are often quite texturally complex as explained in depth by Matthias Bleyl.

Images are copyright of Dieter Villinger & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Stripes

French-based “abstract minimalist” Daniel Buren is well known for his trademark use of stripes, sized consistently at 8.7cm wide. His fascination with the motif has been materialised in the form of paintings, site specific installations and unauthorised public artworks, using striped awning canvases in France, and posting striped posters around Paris including various metro stations. He is perhaps best known for his black and white striped columns installed in a 3000 square metre area outside of the Palais Royal in Paris in 1986, called Les Deux Plateaux and nicknamed Colonnes de Buren.

Sometimes called a conceptual artist for his dealings with space and the gallery setting, Buren blocked the entrance to his first solo exhibition with one of his striped works. Of the Guggenheim Museum, where Buren has exhibited before, he says “[it] really kills a piece of art, primarily because it’s a work of art itself.”

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