The minimal essence

Mrefined, audaciously pared-down, and exemplifying perhaps an ultimate purification in the artistic components of colour, light, line, and form, minimalism is arguably the boldest and most enduringly inspirational aesthetic of 20th century art. From its earliest roots in the turn of the century neo-plasticism of Piet Mondrian, through its meteoric rise in 1960’s America, and right up to the starkest of today’s artistic, architectural, and product design idioms, minimalism remains a tour de force that has shaped our world in its image.

Both oblique and questioning, minimalism sits at odds with the artistic canon, methodically distilling the most basic components of visual culture, while exploring and expanding what art can and should be. Through challenging our instincts and eliciting meditations on art’s most fundamental roles, minimalism allows us to see objectively, removing the personal to leave only pure elements in all their stark and striking wonder.

The heritage of artistic movements, schools of thought, and innovations rarely follows a straight and easily traceable line.

Minimalism, as with any other movement which is at once a philosophy and an aesthetic in itself, meanders its way through the history of visual culture for centuries, before solidifying in the febrile creative environment of 1960s New York. While one can find evidence of minimalist art aesthetics in the monochromatic planes of space and line that typify ancient zen art, in the Bauhaus principles of unsullied primary colours, and in Mondrian’s mystifyingly engaging compositions, the movement required a sense of opposition in which to truly flourish.

This point of opposition came in the form of abstract expressionism, and in the neo-baroque, textured, and often tortured brushstrokes of mid 20th century American painting. Abstract expressionists, such as Rothko and De Kooning, were animatedly expressing the soul and psyche of the artist on canvas, occupying vast spaces with dense, gestural, and overwrought layers of paint. Minimalism arose as the ultimate counterpoint to this, eschewing the inward completely, with an expressed intention to create “art which excludes the unnecessary”, and to formulate artworks which inhabit their own reality without imitating or expressing anything but themselves.

Therein lies the most compelling and enduring aspect of minimalism, and the essence of its postmodern power. Minimalist art makes no attempt to represent an outside reality, and for the first time in art history, presented artworks which were neither a depiction of the world around us, nor the world within. Rather, the artists of the minimalist movement simply wished for the viewer to respond to what was present before them, to immediately react to sculptures, paintings, and installations occupying physical and sensory space. New York artist Frank Stella claimed of his minimalist paintings that “What you see is what you see”, a seven-word manifesto for art without deception, and for art which does not try to be, but which simply is.

La Prairie