Frank Stella
He was a key figure in American modernism, Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Color Field Painting. In 1959, he released his series of blacked striped paintings. He emphasized the flatness of the canvas and was one of the first Minimalism artist to make the movement more popular. As he moved on in his career he used a wide range of colors and focused on the basic elements of art like shape, color, and composition. |
Ellsworth Kelly
He was one of the first Artist to use irregular shaped canvases and was an important part of the post-war art world. His works consist of paintings, line drawings, layered reliefs, and flat sculptures. He concentrated on the dynamics between shape, form, and color. His paintings are characterized by irregular forms and bold and contrasting colors free of gestural brushstrokes. He gets his inspiration from everyday life like shapes and colors found in plants, architecture, and even shadows on a wall or a lake. He was a great influence on the development of abstract art in America. |
Agnes Martin
Martins has a great legacy of abstract art that has inspired other generations of artist. She is best known for her evocative paintings marked out with pencil lines and pale color washes. She believed that art had emotive and expressive power. Her spiritual inspiration is important to her in making great artwork. Her work is greatly influenced by nature, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism. She used a variation of colors and used the grid as an organizational element in her artwork. She also mixed the styles of Minimalism and Color field to make great pieces of art. |
Anne Truitt
She has been a major figure in American art for over 40 years. She is best known for her large wooden sculptures and her paintings, writings, and drawings. Her use of bright color and determination of setting and form set her apart from another Minimalist artist. Her beautiful sculptures were made of standing blocks of wood five to seven feet tall. After standing and priming the wood she would paint the wood with several coats of gesso and acrylic paint to create a visual masterpiece. Her most important works were created in the early 1960s. |
Donald Judd
Donald Judd's work was built on the idea of the object as it exists in the environment. He used geometric and modular creations that were characterized by plain design and the lack of content, questioning the very nature of art. When he built sculptures, they were meant to emphasize the purity of the objects rather than the meaning behind the objects. He rejected classical ideals of representational sculpturing and his work had a direct material and physical presence. He has combined a lot of industrial materials like iron, steel, plastic, and plexiglas. Judd also bought a Air Force base in Marfa, Texas and established the Chinati Foundation, which is an contemporary art museum in 1986. |
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
He is considered one of the best architects in the 20th century. He believed in the idea of open space and clean surfaces and followed the mantra "less is more" and that the most important feature of the house is its functionally. He designed houses with steel and glass instead of concrete and made houses that were functional, modern, and look good. His most famous pieces are The New National Gallery in Berlin, The Barcelona Pavilion, Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago and the Seagram Building in New York City. |
Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse was a German-born American artist and a innovative sculptors in the 1960s. She used textiles, latex, and fiberglass to bring in a new conceptual era of sculpture. She is considered one of the founders of Post-Minimalism. She was inspired by her peers Sol Lewitt and Joseph Beuys. She also worked hard to reject the status quo definitions of form and spatial relationships. She was born on January 11, 1936 in Hamburg, Germany and fled World War II because to she was Jewish, settling in New York's Washington Heights neighborhood by 1939. She emerged from the avant-garde scene in 1966 with her inclusion in Lucy Lippard’s landmark “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition. Tragically, she died on May 29, 1970 in New York, NY from a brain tumor at the age of 34. |
Robert Morris
Robert Morris is one of the central pieces of Minimalism. He grew up in a suburban area in Kansas City. Through both his own sculptures of the 1960s and theoretical writings, Morris set forth a vision of art that cut off simple geometric shapes stripped of metaphorical associations, and focused on the artwork's interaction with the viewer. His key ideas was him using geometric shapes like cubes and rectangular beams. Morris differed from other Minimalists like Donald Judd and Carl Andre, and had a diverse range and was the forefront of other American art movements as well as the Minimalism art movement. |
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was the only child of Russian Jewish parents. His family lived in Hartford, Connecticut until his father, a doctor, died when Sol was six years old. Thereafter, LeWitt and his mother, a nurse, lived with his aunt in New Britain, Connecticut. He used traditional materials like wood, canvas, and paint but focused on concepts and systems. He let the materials speak for themselves to demonstrate their vulnerability to decay and destruction |
Carl Andre
Carl is an American Conceptual artist known for his Minimalist sculptures and installations. Like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, Andre helped define the early Minimalist movement. Born on September 16, 1935 in Quincy, MA, he went on to study at the Phillips Academy in Andover, MA where he met and befriended the artist Frank Stella. His straightforward arrangements of factory-cut wood, bricks, and other raw materials changed the framework of how sculpture is seen and made today. |
Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin was an American artist and pioneer of Minimalism, best known for his seminal installations of light fixtures. Born on April 1, 1933 in Jamaica, NY, Flavin showed an interest in art during his early adulthood, and went on to study at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts before attending Columbia University. He worked with fluorescent lights and he embraced the temporary nature of his art. His dedication to simple forms, use of industrial materials, and symbolic meaning allied his practice to the work of both Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. |
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is regarded as one of the greatest 20th century sculptors of the postmodernist era, the American Minimalist artist Richard Serra is best known for his large scale sheet metal works of public art. Serra was born in 1939 in San Francisco. Between 1957 and 1961 he studied English Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara between 1957 and 1961. Then he studied Fine Art at Yale and his professor was Joseph Albers between 1961 and 1964. Serra began creating abstract sculptures using heavy materials. The public felt his works were "art-world arrogance" - he has become better understood over the years. This is often called avant-garde art. |
Walter de Maria
Walter de Maria bridged multiple movements of artistic practice that blossomed in the 1960s creating interactive sculptural installations and providing conceptual underpinnings to larger-scale sculptural work. Walter de Maria was born in Albany, California, just across the bay from San Francisco. His most ambitious works were not only physically large-scale but also extreme in terms of exhibition duration. Walter de Maria invested heavily in unusually stripped down, fundamental visual forms including everything from simple, yet bold lines to other abstract geometric shapes - channeling his study of the Eastern philosophical emphasis on simplicity. He was also influential on generations of the musical avant-garde, drawing on his studies in jazz |