Sparse

About

Sparseness is a matter of restraint: few forms, generous emptiness, nothing added for decoration. East Asian art made emptiness active long before modern art did. In Southern Song China, painters such as Ma Yuan pushed a few trees and figures into one corner and let mist fill the rest, and the Zen rock garden at Ryōan-ji in Kyoto treats open raked gravel as part of the composition.

In the West, sparse composition became a principle in the 20th century. Ben Nicholson's white reliefs of the 1930s reduce form to shallow circles and rectangles, Ellsworth Kelly isolated single shapes against blank walls, and Minimalists such as Dan Flavin and Tony Smith placed a few industrial units in otherwise empty rooms. Lee Ufan's Relatum works set a stone and a steel plate in dialogue across a bare floor. Look at the empty areas and how they charge what remains.