Exploring the Intersection of Minimalism and Abstract Art: Pioneers and Key Principles

Many people confuse the terms abstraction and minimalism, taking both to mean a reduction of a concept to a basic idea or form. While these two concepts are similar, they are not the same, and they have inspired vastly different artistic movements throughout history. 

Here’s what you need to know about abstraction, abstract expressionism, minimalism, and how all of these concepts interact in the modern world of art.

Minimalism versus Abstract Expressionism

Though the two fields appeared relatively closely in history, Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism are two vastly different fields of art, though one did directly inspire the other.

What is Abstraction?

Abstraction is the process of taking a subject from the visible world and transforming it into a visual concept that is not directly tied to its realistic appearance. This art form often includes reduced detail and simple shapes and compositions that are intended to represent more complicated ideas.

What is Abstract Expressionism?

Abstract expressionism is a movement that was popular in the United States and around the world in the 1950s and into the early 1960s. This artistic movement focused on taking the ordinary and seeing it through an unusual lens, relying heavily on the interpretation of the artist to create pieces with little or no visual rhythm or reason. 

Artists in this era generally used innovative and messy techniques including splatter and drop painting to create busy, colorful works intended to express emotional ideas and concepts behind everyday experiences. 

What is Minimalism?

Minimalism is an artistic movement that became popular in the 1960s and into the 1970s in the United States primarily. This movement focuses on reducing art to its simplest form, removing the pretension and exclusion common to the field in previous movements.

Minimalist pieces generally have simple, direct themes and are composed of a few easy-to-understand base elements, often geometric and featuring repetitive patterns. They are often made of unusual materials like wood, glass, and plastic, and tend to have exhibits that interact with their environments, making the space a part of the art.

Is all Minimalism Abstract art?

Though some Minimalist art is abstract, not all Abstract art is Minimalist. In fact, the Minimalism movement was started in direct opposition to the Abstract Expressionism movement, which used abstraction to create chaotic, full pieces with little or no visible order.

A subsection of Minimalism is called Abstract Minimalist art, which uses abstraction as a way to organize and simplify subjects and media into conceptual pieces. The goal of these pieces is often to create something aesthetically simple and devoid of difficult or personal meaning, instead intended to celebrate the world as it is and present it without the trappings of daily life. 

This intersection between minimalism as a concept and abstraction as an artistic device leads to pieces that use simple geometric shapes and organizations to create repetitive patterns or presentations which aim to dismiss the mysticality and elitism that are often associated with art. This style is especially popular in many pieces of modern art.

Pioneers of Minimalism and Abstract art

Here are some key figures of the Minimalist and Abstract movements who influenced the world of art.

Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin was an American artist (born in Canada, but immigrated) who worked as an arts teacher in New Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s. After her work was discovered by a gallerist, Martin moved to New York in 1957 to live and work on Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan. There, she worked with other popular artists at the time including Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. During this time, she created Harbor Number 1 (1957), which is considered one of her earliest New York pieces and built on the work she created in New Mexico to include elements of her new surroundings.

Martin’s signature style included the use of six-foot by six-foot canvases painted, gridded in pencil, and covered in gesso, usually including strong geometric elements and repetition. She combined the inherent meaning of Abstract Expressionism with the repetitive, simple construction of Minimalism to create pieces that were spiritual in nature and which celebrated the simplicity of a world “without interruption…or obstacle.”

Her later work, inspired by the difficulties she faced in her personal life, was full of bold geometric designs and warm color palettes that were almost directly pulled from the desert landscapes to which she had returned.

Carl Andre

Carl Andre is another American artist well-known in the Minimalist movement. Andre was a sculptor who worked with a variety of industrial materials like wood, brick, and metal to create intensely physical and interactive pieces. 

Andre’s work was largely inspired by his time spent working in rail yards and his interest in Stonehenge in England. He created structural pieces that were intended to offer obvious insight into their construction, and which played into the spaces in which they were installed, making the negative space part of the piece. As an example of this, his 1967 piece, “10x10 Altstadt Copper Square,” is, as the title implies, a 10-foot by 10-foot square composed of one-by-one squares of copper sheeting that is currently installed directly in the floor of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Gallery goers are encouraged to walk on the piece and interact with it directly, listening to the sounds that it makes and how it feels.

Andre’s career came to a halt after his involvement in the death of his wife Ana Mendieta. Though he was eventually acquitted, the trial left a major stain on his career that resulted in a 30-year spell where no gallery would display his work. This ended in 2014, when an exhibition from the Dia Art Foundation included a retrospective of his pieces, though this was met with major protests that continued for three years.

Sol LeWitt

Born in Connecticut, Solomon LeWitt, better known by the nickname “Sol,” created drawings, paintings, and sculptures that aligned with both the Minimalism movement and the Conceptual Art movement. He was most prolific in the 1960s, creating several series of geometric pieces that often included cubes, pyramids, and other simple shapes and which could span in size from a small stack of books to massive outdoor installations.

LeWitt’s most popular series of “Structures” is his modular cubes, a series of white-painted hollow cubes with a specific aspect ratio - 8:5:1 - that encouraged a focus on the negative space within the cubes themselves, allowing for an interplay between the space and the work. Many modern museums offer educational material for children about the mathematical properties of the pieces. This theme of simple, self-imposed restrictions was typical of most of LeWitt’s body of work; many of his pieces have restrictions on proportions, distribution, and symmetry.

LeWitt wrote several books that described his artistic principles and ideas. These concepts heavily influenced both the later abstract art movements and the Minimalist movement of his contemporaries. He’s now considered a fundamental artist for both movements.

Conclusion

Minimalism and Abstract art have quite a bit in common, though they aren’t exactly the same. It’s important to understand both artistic movements in order to fully appreciate their merits on an individual level; they’re complimentary periods in art history that still influence modern aspects of the field including interior design and gallery installations. When we better understand how these two movements interact, we can see how they changed the world of art over time, moving from the idea of abstraction as an expressive tactic to abstraction as a method of simplifying art and making it more accessible to everyday audiences.