Monochrome Painting - Artists - Minimalists

Minimalists

• Ellsworth Kelly

(b. 1923, Newburgh, New York, USA) spent a lot of time in both Paris and New York. Not strictly a minimalist, he has made a number of monochrome paintings on shaped canvases and single color rectangular panels. His abstractions were “abstracted” from nature. His interest in nature extends so far that he has made a series of plant lithographs in an impressive and sincerely realistic style.

• Mino Argento

(1927, Rome, Italy-) monotones, white on white paintings were variations on the gridded, rectangle on rectangle themes, but were enlivened with differences in rhythm and conception. One composition included grayed grids and vertical rectagles in several, more opaque whites, clustered centrally.

• Agnes Martin

(1912, Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada - 2004, Taos, New Mexico, USA) whose works of the 1950s and 1960s are serene meditations on “perfection,” and hence “beauty,” are typically white, off-white or pale grey canvases with faint evidence of pencil dragged in lines or grids across the painted surface.

• Robert Ryman

(b. 1930, Nashville, Tennessee, USA) in works such as Ledger (1982) bring the word “constructed” to mind, with attention drawn to supports, framing, and the artist's signature as important elements of works which are usually white, or off-white, and in square format. Abstract Expressionist brushwork is used as formal material in these minimalist constructions. Ryman exhibits a tour de force of variation on a deliberately limited theme.

• Brice Marden

(b. 1938, Bronxville, New York, USA) in his earliest mature works explored a reductive strategy which seemed similar to that of Jasper Johns’s and Ellsworth Kelly's contemporaneous works, yet more formalist: paintings such as Return 1 consist of subtly grey fields painted in encaustic (wax-medium) with a narrow strip along the bottom of the canvas where Marden left bare evidence of process (i.e., drips and spatters of paint). During the late 1980s Brice Marden, who held a spiritual/emotional view of abstraction, began a more multi-colored and calligraphic form of abstract painting.

• Frank Stella

(b. 1936, Malden, Massachusetts, USA) echoed composer Igor Stravinsky’s famous assertion that “music is powerless to express anything but itself” when he said “What you see is what you see,” a remark he later qualified by saying his early paintings were influenced to a degree by the writing of Samuel Beckett (see above). In his work he was attempting to minimize any inference of “spiritual” or even “emotional” response on the part of the viewer, and this is perhaps most striking in his pinstripe Black Paintings (Marriage of Reason and Squalor - detail - 1959) beginning in the late ’50s, where the pinstripes are articulated by unpainted canvas. Later, Stella abandoned not only monochrome, but also eventually geometric painting.

• John McCracken

(b. 1934, Berkeley, California, USA) is characteristically Minimalist in that his "objects" aren't adequately categorized as "painting" or "sculpture." Famous since 1965 for "slabs, columns, planks ... Neutral forms," his meticulously finished, polished monochrome objects are often simply leaned up against gallery walls, in what some critics describe as a casual "West Coast-lean." Although he draws from techniques characteristic of surfboard manufacture, his works are personally and meticulously handcrafted, unlike those of John M. Miller and other more recent artists, which are typically factory-made according to the artist's specifications.

• Allan McCollum

(b. 1944, Los Angeles, California, USA) determined in the mid-1970s that the social forces that give paintings meaning may be better understood if the "painting" itself could be reduced to a generic form—a painting that could read as a "sign" for a painting," which could function of a "placeholder," or a kind of "prop." In the 1970s and early 80s he painted what he called Surrogate Paintings, and ultimately began casting them in plaster, frame and all. These hundreds of objects that looked like framed, matted, fields of painted blackness, worked as neutral, "generic signs" that might inspire the viewer to think about the social expectations that constructed the "idea" of a painting," more than the actual painting itself. By reducing paintings to mere signs of themselves, McCollum turned the gallery and the museum setting into a kind of theater, highlighting the drama of presenting, displaying, buying and selling, exchanging, photographing, assessing, criticising, choosing, and writing about the works; the object-paintings at the center of the action were purposely rendered moot, in order to turn one's attention to the supplementary devices and social practices that, in the end, bestow the value on the work. Paradoxically, as time went by, these neutral objects became valuable in themselves, as symbols of an anthropological way of looking at art.

• Anne Truitt

(1921–2004) was an American artist of the mid-20th century; she is associated with both minimalism and Color Field artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Primarily thought of as a minimalist sculptor, and as a colorist who painted her sculpture, throughout her career Truitt produced several series of Monochromatic paintings.

She made what is considered her most important work in the early 1960s anticipating in many respects the work of minimalists like Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly. She was unlike the minimalists is some significant ways. She named, for instance, many of her works after places and events that were important to her - a practice suggesting a narrative beyond and yet somehow contained by the sculpture.

The sculpture that made her significant to the development of Minimalism were aggressively plain and painted structures, often large. The recessional platform under her sculpture raised them just enough off the ground that they appeared to float on a thin line of shadow. The boundary between sculpture and ground, between gravity and verticality, was made illusory. This formal ambivalence is mirrored by her insistence that color itself, contained a psychological vibration which when purified, as it is on a work of art, isolates the event it refers to as a thing rather than a feeling. The event becomes a work of art, a visual sensation delivered by color.