CategoriesStyles and Movements
Political Minimalism
Contemporary art that uses Minimalism's stark forms, such as the monochrome, the stack and the grid, to address politics, identity and loss.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Political Minimalism are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
In the 1960s Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt presented boxes, bricks and grids as objects with no story to tell. Since the late 1980s many artists have borrowed that pared-down language to carry content about bodies, labour, race and power. The label is informal, used by critics rather than claimed by a group.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres made the clearest case. His spills of wrapped sweets, such as “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991), from which visitors may take a piece, made Minimalist form an image of a partner lost to AIDS. Byron Kim's Synecdoche (begun 1991) is a grid of small panels, each matched to one person's skin, and Glenn Ligon stencils borrowed sentences about race until they smear into dark fields. Santiago Sierra pays workers to perform pointless tasks. Art historians such as Anna Chave have in turn read 1960s Minimalism as a rhetoric of power.
Related artists
More in Styles and Movements
Political Pop
Pop and Contemporary Pop
Pop Art
Post-'70s Ego Generation
Post-Impressionism
Post-Internet Art
Post-Painterly Abstraction
Post-War American Art
Post-War European Art
Post-World War I European Classicism
Post-World War II School of Paris
Postminimalism
Pre-Raphaelites
Pre-World War II School of Paris
Precisionism
Process Art
Progressive Artists' Movement
Purism
Relational Aesthetics
Renaissance
Rinpa School
Rococo Art and Design
