From Donald Judd to Frank Stella, the Minimalists of the 1960s aspired to create the most simplified forms of abstract art possible. Their sparse, geometric paintings and sculptures signaled a radical rejection of the paint-flinging style of the Abstract Expressionists, who had risen to popularity a decade earlier. The Minimalists shared a radical focus on the essential building blocks of an artwork, stripping away signs of the artist’s personality and representational subject matter that might distract the viewer from experiencing these elements in their purest forms. “A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself,” Judd explained. “It shouldn’t be concealed as part of a fairly different whole.” Known for their serial approach to artmaking, the Minimalists often repeated the same compositions and structures with slight modifications (for example, a series of painted horizontal lines with subtle color variations) in order to heighten their viewers’ visual perception. In the past decade, museum retrospectives and rising auction records have spotlighted overlooked minimalist pioneers, including the Cuban-born abstractionist Carmen Herrara, the Canadian-American painter Agnes Martin, and Korean Dansaekwa artists Park Seo-bo and Lee Ufan.
