Postminimalism

About

The critic Robert Pincus-Witten gave the name in the early 1970s to work by artists who had absorbed Minimalism's plain materials and repetition but rejected its hard, closed perfection. The shift was already visible in 1966, when Lucy Lippard's exhibition Eccentric Abstraction showed soft, organic and faintly bodily sculpture.

Postminimalism is an umbrella rather than a style. Eva Hesse hung ropes and cast rubbery latex and fibreglass into works such as Contingent (1969), where repetition turns fragile and skin-like. Bruce Nauman used his own body, neon and casts of negative space, as in A Cast of the Space Under My Chair (1966–68). Richard Tuttle pinned small pieces of dyed cloth and wire to the wall, Jackie Winsor wound rope and bound timber into dense, laborious forms, and Gordon Matta-Clark sliced through abandoned buildings. Look for perishable materials, gravity and chance left visible, and personal, even humorous, meaning.