Minimalism and Its Afterimage

Dan Flavin’s (1933–1996) the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (1963), a fluorescent tube installed at a 45 degree angle on the gallery wall, marks an important reconsideration of the artist’s first work realized entirely in fluorescent light, a recognized breakthrough in his oeuvre. Nearby, the reflective surfaces of important works by Larry Bell (b. 1939) and John McCracken (1934–2011), two noted Light and Space artists, echo Flavin’s luminous drive. Coinciding with the artist’s centennial, a large-scale black monochromatic work by Ellsworth Kelly rejects rectilinear painting conventions. Casting aside conventionally privileged ideas of authorship and originality, Sturtevant’s (1924–2014) copy of a 1959 composition by premier Minimalist painter Frank Stella, Stella The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (First Version) (1990), propounds appropriation and repetition as a characteristic feature of Minimalism’s afterimage.

Developed in the United States in the late 1950s through the 1970s, the stylistically-reductive and geometrically-informed approach to artmaking now known as Minimalism has been understood as an extension of abstraction’s disavowal of painterly representations. Instead, Minimalism proffers the medium of an artwork as its literal reality, with no attempt made to represent the outside world. The implications of such ideas continue to resonate with generations of painters and sculptors, as in the postmodernist tendencies of Conceptual art, the social commentary of Neo-Geo, or the thoughtful reassessments of Appropriation art.