Essay On Minimalism

Minimalism emerged in New York in the early 1960s. It is also referred to “ABC”, “cool”, “literal” or “minimal” art, while a important movement of postmodernist art. The primary characteristics and goals of Minimalism is extreme simplicity of form, in order to give the work a completely literal presence. In fact, it’s a type of visual art reduced to the essentials of geometric abstraction. The principal of minimalism is that not the artist’s expression, but the medium and materials of the work are its reality. As minimalist painter Frank Stella once said: “What you see is what you see”. In Stalla’s hard-edge painting, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, he uses of strips in two vertical sets of inverted U-shape, creates a regular pattern. He also uses black enamel and a house-painter's brush. The slight irregular line of the stripes reveals that the painter worked freehand. Stalla’s painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there.
The focus on surface meant that the meaning of the object was not seen as important to the object itself, but comes from the interaction between viewers with the object. This led to the emphasis on the physical space in which the artwork resided, such as Kelly’s “Sculpture for a large wall”. It’s a huge combination of aluminum panels, each of the panels oriented in a different way, so that color and form are made to interact with both the wall and the space of the viewer. The work captures the effect of sunlight on a river and the light and shade on buildings in cityscapes. While compare with the painting, the artists painted simple canvases that were considered minimal due to they used of only line, solid color, and geometric forms and shaped canvases. These artists combined painting materials in their own