On the approach

Josef Albers (b.1888, Bottrop, Germany – d. 1976, New Haven, USA), was a student of Johannes Itten in 1920, a teacher at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, and taught design in Dessau before leaving Nazi German to find refuge in the United States where he and his wife Anni Albers became the head of the Black Mountain College. The series of paintings entitled Homage to the Square (1950-1976) consists of a systematic repetition of three or four colorful squares, which potentially endless subtle chromatic overlaps and associations create an impression of space. Here presented in one of the artist’s rare original frames, this minimalist work concentrates on geometry and color, which Albers theorized in his essay Interaction of Color. This combinatory series explores the interactive possibilities of color associations.

Imi Knoebel (b.1940, Dessau, Germany) is a German contemporary artist who studied alongside Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where he shared a studio space with Blinky Palermo. He is a major figure of 20^th century minimalist abstraction known for his flat abstract sculptures and paintings composed of juxtaposed panels. Knoebel’s work questions the relationship between space, color and the image’s medium. The style and formal concerns of his paintings and sculptures are directly related to the modernist principles as defined by Kazimir Malevitch and the Bauhaus.  

Here, this monochromatic white painting composed of irregular polygons is the precise minimal result of a fusion of rectangular shapes. Knoebel used the most basic, often -unpainted- raw materials, looking to extend the notion of pure perception in abstract art. In his own words: “When I look at an artwork, I can do nothing but see its beauty, and I don’t want to see it in relationship with anything else. Only what I see, simply because it is valid in itself.”

André Cadere (b.1934, Warsaw, Poland – d.1978, Paris, France) is a Romanian conceptual artist emigrated in Paris in 1967, whose performative and dissenting approach made light of the art world codes in the wake of minimal, conceptual and Land art. In the 1970s, Cadere walked into exhibitions with a “clandestine” stick he sometimes inadvertently left in the gallery. Most often, it was a wooden stick mounted with multicolor cylindrical rings without front or back, like an endless painting thwarting the codes of traditional two-dimensional painting. The ordering of the rings followed a precise mathematical system of color permutation.  By bringing and leaving his sticks in art places, Cadere also revealed the cultural conditions necessary to see a work of art. All at once a painting, a sculpture and a mobile, the work blurs the pre-established frontiers between those categories, questioning the identity of the author and the work, as well as the relevance of its signature and the “object”.

Claude Rutault (b.1941, Les Trois-Moutiers, France) pushed the limits of minimalism and conceptualism through a radical approach which founding principle consisted in a set of written instructions called “definitions/methods” meant for the receiver or guardian of his works (collector, curator, institution or museum). Definition/method a hundred and eighty-eight: in Carré réel / carré virtuel, four stretched canvases on a frame -non-orthogonal quadrangles – painted in the same color as the wall are hung outside of a virtual non-orthogonal quadrangle, which limits they outline. At most, the virtual quadrangle is on the wall, taking into account the four canvases of various sizes that outline it. The work thus questions the notion of choice and non-choice of color and monochrome in a specific context. The color of the work is left to the exhibition curator’s whim. The latter chose purple for this new iteration, a color purposedly rich in pigments with a muted tonality and non-decorative qualities

Kenneth Noland (b.1924, Asheville, USA – d.2010, Port Clyde, USA), painter and sculptor, studied with Josef Albers at the Black Mountain College, a school based in North Carolina that became the cradle of avant-gardes in decorative and contemporary art. Major representative of the Color Field movement founded in reaction to Action Painting in the 1940s-50s, in New York, Noland dismissed the individual artistic gesture cherished by abstract expressionists. His works mostly consist of fields of solid primary colors creating uninterrupted plans where “color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject matter itself.” Here, Noland’s superposition of saturated yellow stripes on warm beige painted without any sign of the artist’s hand directed the choice of the painting’s shape and size.

Frank Stella (b.1936, Malden, USA) is one of the most prominent representatives of the American avant-garde leading to minimalism, a movement he pioneered. Through his body of works and essays, Stella questions the pictorial surface and the “painting-object”. The Polish Village series is the fruit of such experiments. Following a cubist and constructivist logic, this abstract composition is an architectural synthesis of East Poland’s wooden synagogues from the 17^th to 19^th century, which were destroyed during WWII. His interpretation consists of volumes exceeding the esthetic boundaries of standard canvases, turning into complex spatial constructions of bright and muted colors that combine painting on wood, cardboard and dyed fabric. Stella’s practice of one-dimensional sculpture is what brought him toward monumental minimalist sculpture in 1972.

Dan Flavin (b.1933, Jamaica, USA – d.1996, Riverhead, USA) worked with a simple and minimalist vocabulary of geometrical shapes using basic industrial materials. This installation of fluorescent lamps from a hardware store is characteristic of Flavin’s work. The lights, here pink and green emanating from these horizontally superposed neon lights radiate and restructure the space around them, thus altering our perception and emphasizing architectural structures. Such wide opening of the material limits of the object offered a new perspective within the evolving field of sculpture in the 1960s in the United States. Proposing a brand-new esthetic experience, this radical artistic gesture laid the foundation for minimalism.

Anne Truitt (b.1921, Baltimore, USA – d.2004, Washington, USA), psychology student and nurse, author of poems and short stories, American painter and sculptor, was a leading figure of minimalism. At the contact of Kenneth Noland, she developed a unique minimal visual grammar. She is also known for her large wood sculptures carefully layered with paint. She started experimenting with abstraction and formal esthetic in the 1960s. Her work is mainly concerned with questions of colors and monochromes, in relationship with the works of Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman. As the artist stated herself: “I try to enhance and free color … I try to bring color into three dimensions.” She works directly on wood or canvas and paints in an intensive process, where many thin, almost translucent layers of paint are applied one on top of the other, alternating horizontal and vertical brushstrokes that reveal a thin, brighter triangle at its center. His plain and simple colors gradually intensify under his gestures like a ritual.

 

Martin Barré (b.1924, Nantes, France – d.1993, Paris, France) is one of the most original French painters of European post-war abstraction. He moved to Paris in the 1950s after studying architecture and painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Nantes. This painting is part of a series for which Barré applied the same precise multi-step protocol with unfinishable results. Inspired by Malevitch, his interest in the space within the painting here shows through two visible grids: one oblique grid extending beyond the pictorial frame, and a second inside it.  The barely perceptible squares that make up the works of this series are sometimes hatched, left blank, or filled with color like here, in a very subtle and minimal way. The visibility of these various minor steps evokes temporal stratification.

Heimo Zobernig (b. 1958, Mauthen, Austria) is an Austrian contemporary artist, still very active today, who created his first works in the 1970s. Their wide range of media materially express the many theories the artist has formalized in his essays, as well as in the classes he gave at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. This white monochrome is painted over an assemblage of four pieces of fabric of various colors. The brightness of the barely visible colors present under the pictorial layer pops up on the borders of the canvas, thus blurring the reading of the work and its usual codes. In his paintings, Zobernig plays with a modernist esthetic based on monochrome and grid, looking to renew the formal language of constructivism and geometrical abstraction.