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(b Quincy, MA, Sept 16, 1935).

American sculptor. He attended the Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, from 1951 to 1953, and in 1954 he visited England, where he was greatly impressed by Stonehenge. From 1955 to 1956 he served in the US Army; in 1957 he moved to New York, where he began to write poetry. He also made drawings and sculpture in Perspex and wood. He met Frank Stella in 1958 and in 1959 he shared his studio where he made large sculptures, such as Last Ladder (wood, 2.14×1.55×1.55 m; 1959; London, Tate). The Black Paintings on which Stella was working had a considerable influence on Andre both for their non-referentiality and for their symmetrical and non-hierarchic compositions, in which no part was given more emphasis than any other. Andre’s totemic wooden sculptures, such as Ladder No. 2 (wood, 2.1×0.15×0.15 m, 1959; London, Tate), are indebted to Constantin Brancusi but were cut rather than carved. Many of them were constructed according to what Andre called structural building principles, in which elements were stacked and interlocked....

(b Saint Nicholas, Nov 1, 1926; d New York, NY, Aug 17, 2013).

American sculptor and installation artist of Greek birth. Known for his neon environments, he has used light over five decades to explore spatial and temporal relationships. Settling with his family in New York in 1930, he graduated from Brooklyn Community College in 1947. Through the 1950s, he experimented with assemblage and was interested in Abstract Expressionism as well as Arte Povera. In 1960, he began to design neon configurations for interior spaces. While the geometry of his forms recalls emerging Minimalism, the richly glowing colors in such works as Red Box over Blue Box (1973; La Jolla, CA, Mus. Contemp. A.) are sensuous and emotionally evocative, thus differentiating Antonakos from his strictly Minimalist contemporaries. He uses incomplete geometric forms, suggesting Gestalt shapes, to invite the viewer to participate imaginatively in their completion. Since 1973, Antonakos has created nearly 50 permanent public works in America, Europe and Japan, such as ...

(b Zawory, nr Gdańsk, June 15, 1934).

Polish painter, sculptor and stage designer. He studied at the Higher School of Plastic Arts in Poznań between 1952 and 1958. His abstract work has a certain affinity with hard-edge painting and Minimalism. In his early paintings the circular or oval shape of the canvas restates the shape of the form painted on it and thereby becomes its real analogue (as in Double Circles and Circle Compositions, 1962–5). At about the same time he produced sculptures made from thin wire. In the paintings after 1965 the actual space becomes a part of the composition and begins to supplant painted, illusory forms; and the ‘empty’ space starts to play an increasingly important role (e.g. Structural Painting with Hole, 1965).

At the end of the 1960s Berdyszak produced the series of double and triple Integral Paintings, in which the initial formal composition is subjected to multiplication and modification. The sculptures from this period are loosely assembled groups of simple, geometrical elements that allow the viewer to rearrange them. Between ...

(b New Haven, CT, 1949).

American painter. He completed a BA at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, in 1971 and later settled in New York. Initially influenced by Post-minimalism, process art and conceptual art, he was soon attracted to the tactility and allusions to the body in the work of Brice Marden, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. Spurred on by the revival of interest in Surrealism in the 1970s, Dunham began to make abstract, biomorphic paintings reminiscent of the work of Arshile Gorky and André Masson, executed with a comic twist enhanced by lurid colours and the suggestion of contemporary psychedelia. In the 1980s he began to paint on wood veneer and rose to prominence in the context of a broader return to painting in the period. Age of Rectangles (1983–5; New York, MOMA) is a highly abstract composition of differing forms, symptomatic of his work at this time: geometric sketches co-exist with eroticized organic shapes while the forms of the wood veneer show through the surface of the paint to suggest surging forces. Towards the end of the 1980s he began to move towards single, dominating motifs; wave-like forms were particularly common. In the ...

Vast environments constructed of earth, or markings on it, made from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. The largely young, male New York sculptors who created them extended minimalism’s arrays of units making interior ‘environments’ into open outdoor spaces. The earthen cuts and mounds were made on remote terrain of little economic worth, such as western deserts and, as materials that would provide structure and permanence were eschewed, earthworks’ forms were transient—either ephemeral or unstable.

Robert Smithson’s announcement in the June 1967 issue of Artforum that ‘The “boring”, like other “earth works” [two words], is becoming more and more important to artists. Pavements, holes, trenches, mounds, heaps, paths, ditches, roads, terraces, etc., all have an esthetic potential’ sparked this informal movement. A strong post-war economy, ensuing social optimism, and a baby-boomer, youth-driven, fervently anti-tradition, anti-Establishment, pro-innovation mood fuelled sculptors’ expansion of materials, locales, and scale. But while countering high culture, the earthworkers were not turning towards ‘nature’. Garnering cultural cachet due to the concurrence with nascent environmentalism and the hippies’ ‘back-to-nature’ movement, the ambitious sculptors specifically rejected connection to ‘Mother Nature’, an association they considered romantic and propagandistic but which was nevertheless adopted by critics as a catchy rationale. The works’ wilderness locales, coarse materials, and massive amounts of displaced earth demonstrate that these were not idyllic pastorals....

The use of organic abstract form in sculpture evoking the gendered body through an emphasis on process and materials. Lucy Lippard coined the term for an article in Art International which formed the basis for an exhibition at Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1966. Eccentric abstraction signaled the onset of Post-minimalism. The exhibition included Alice Adams (b 1930), Louise Bourgeois, Lindsey Decker (1923–96), Eva Hesse, Gary Kuehn (b 1939), Jean Linder (b 1938), Bruce Nauman, Don Potts (b 1936), Keith Sonnier, and Frank Lincoln Viner (b 1937). Lippard defined eccentric abstraction as an exploration of sensuous experience, evoking intuitively some of the psychological themes explored by Surrealism but without Surrealism’s literary allusions and literal imagery. Instead of Surrealist-inspired assemblage, the accumulation of recognizable objects, eccentric abstraction explored the formal and material properties of nonobjective art. It drew on Minimalist themes of presenting a single, whole, unified form, the emphasis on phenomenological experience to create meaning, and the withdrawal of personal expression in favor of exploration of the material properties of contemporary industrial materials. Unlike in Minimalism, however, the materials favored by these artists, such as felt, latex, vinyl, rubber, or fiberglass, tended to evoke bodily properties such as softness, inflation, and droopiness. This work also drew on Pop art’s irreverence for established artistic methods and experiments with soft sculpture and materials previously considered kitsch or vulgar. Lippard referred to eccentric abstraction as a “non-sculptural style,” closer to abstract painting than to sculpture in part because of its active investigation of color, but producing three-dimensional objects which broke down the form–content dichotomy....

(b New York, April 1, 1933; d Riverhead, NY, Nov 29, 1996).

American installation artist and painter. His father intended him to become a priest and from 1947 to 1952 he attended a seminary in Brooklyn, New York. In 1954 he studied at the University of Maryland Extension Program in Osan-Ni in Korea and in 1956 at the New College for Social Research in New York. He continued these art history studies in 1957–9 at Columbia University, New York, but was self-taught as an artist. His early work of the late 1950s and early 1960s was influenced by contemporary American art and included paintings with added objects.

By 1961 Flavin had begun to make Minimalist works using incandescent or fluorescent electric lights, such as Icon I (1961; see 1969 exh. cat., p. 125), which consisted of a monochrome painted wooden square with a fluorescent light mounted on the top edge. He frequently dedicated pieces to historic and contemporary art figures who inspired him. A series of ‘monuments’ dedicated to Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin extended this technique into what became his mature style: installations, usually temporary, using white or coloured fluorescent light tubes (...

(b Florence, 1935).

American choreographer of Italian birth. An influential choreographer in post-modern dance, Forti’s approach and formal language had an important impact on experimental art of the early 1960s, from Happenings to Minimalism. Born in Italy, her family escaped during World War II to Los Angeles. She attended Reed College before moving in 1956 with her husband, Robert Morris, to San Francisco. There she attended the famous Dance Workshop of Anna Halprin (b 1920), whose innovative approach proved critically influential to a generation of renowned dancer–choreographers. When Forti and Morris moved to New York in 1959–60 she studied with Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and, perhaps most importantly for her, Robert Ellis Dunn (1928–96). At this time, Forti also taught at a nursery school, and avidly studied the movement of children, importing it directly into her choreography.

A key member of the downtown experimental art scene, her work appeared in concerts at the Reuben Gallery (...

(b Bydgoszcz, Pomerania, Nov 14, 1932).

Polish conceptual artist. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, in 1953–9. His earliest work draws on his experience of Minimalism and Op art. The series Optical Objects (1958–65), for example, geometrical reliefs modelled according to mathematical calculations and painted in a range of tones from white to grey to black, exploits both natural and artificial effects of light and shade. Environment (1968), an assembly of solid three-dimensional forms, could be seen simultaneously as a unified structure and as a collection of individual ‘works’, and it was on the periphery of architecture, sculpture and painting.

In 1970 Gostomski conceived the piece It Begins in Wrocław, an ‘impossible’ project, in which three arbitrarily selected forms, beginning in a defined point in the centre of Wrocław, were to spread out in an equally arbitrary manner through the city, the continent, the globe, and eventually into galactic infinity. In ...

(b Urbana, IL, March 31, 1942).

American performance artist, video artist, and writer. Graham founded the Daniels Gallery in New York and was its director from 1964 to 1965; there he came into contact with Minimalist artists such as Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Donald Judd. This led him to question the gallery structure and the art displayed and to experiment with conceptual art. From 1965 to 1969 he produced a series of works published in magazines, such as Schema (1966; Brussels, Daled priv. col., see 1988 exh. cat., p. 9). This series consisted merely of a descriptive list of its own contents, including the number of words, and so referred to nothing beyond itself, unlike Minimalist art that he believed referred to the surrounding display space. Furthermore, the magazine was, unlike a gallery, clearly related to time and change through its regular appearance and topicality.

From 1969 to 1978 Graham was primarily involved with performance, film, and video. His first performance took place at the Loeb Student Center at New York University in ...

[Dambrowsky, Ivan]

(b Kiev, 1881/6; d London, 1961).

Polish theorist and painter, active in the USA. Though few immigrants maintained ties to Europe as strong as John Graham’s, his titanic effect upon the direction and development of American art surpassed that of many critics and influential artists—an unlikely reality (because of his improbable bearing and background), acknowledged by his artistic disciples and chronicled in fact.

His family were minor Polish aristocrats long resident in Russia. He studied law at the University of Kiev then became a Tsarist cavalry officer to fight the Revolution. After being captured by the Bolsheviks, he escaped to western Europe and by 1920 had arrived in the USA. He changed his name, believing that Graham looked similar to the Cyrillic orthography of Dambrowsky. In New York Graham studied in 1921 under John Sloan at the Art Students League while maintaining contacts with Russian artists including Mikhail Larionov and David Burlyuk. Active as an artist in the 1920s, he corresponded with the American collector Duncan Phillips, who acquired several of his paintings. Graham was acquainted with Picasso (an influence he eventually rejected but not before confusing the situation by claiming they were born in the same year, thus forever muddying the facts of his life) and in the late 1920s had one-man exhibitions in both the USA and Paris. In New York he became prominent as the principal link between modernist artists in New York and Paris. In ...

(b Berkeley, CA, Nov 4, 1944).

American sculptor, painter, and printmaker. Heizer’s earthworks erected in the vast desert expanses of the American Midwest marked the beginning of the Heizer, Michael movement of the 1960s and liberated art from the confines of the art gallery. Heizer’s early experience and exposure to desert landscapes and Native American culture was influenced by his father Robert Heizer, an important American archaeologist, and his maternal grandfather Olaf P. Jenkins, who was an important early American geologist. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute (1963–4) to study painting and moved to New York (1966). In 1967 Heizer left New York to return to the American Midwest with colleague Walter De Maria, and began artistic collaborations with James Turrell and Robert Smithson to explore the making of land art.

Heizer’s early paintings explored the interaction of two-dimensional and three-dimensional geometric forms influenced by the Abstract Expressionists of the late 1940s and 1950s. By ...

(b Edinburgh, March 5, 1962).

Scottish painter. He studied at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen (1980–84), and Edinburgh College of Art (1984–5). In 1988, after a period spent working in Amsterdam, Innes changed his figurative style for a Minimalist abstraction. Since that time, his forms have been created by applying oil paint to canvas, then dissolving and etching into it with turpentine. His restrained and considered aesthetic, often described in spiritual terms, is based strongly on a process involving the physical interaction of the materials with the physical actions of the artist. From the late 1980s he concentrated on series exploring certain painterly processes, each given simple generic titles such as Identified Form, Monologue and Exposed Painting. The vertical format of much of his work, for instance Exposed Vertical on Grey (1992; see 1992 exh. cat.), in which a single white dribble-line bisects a uniform and radiant grey surface, suggests a connection with the spiritual inclinations of earlier abstract painters such as Barnett Newman. The tactility of his paint surfaces, a key aspect of his aesthetic, suggests comparisons with older Minimalist painters such as Robert Ryman; his serial approach and typically modernist concentration on material and surface can be compared with that of the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists in general. His muted palette of the late 1980s gave way to stronger colours in the mid-1990s. The ‘Exposed’ series, including ...

(b Torrington, CT, 1945).

American painter. He studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston from 1964 to 1966 before settling in New York. From 1967 to 1969 Jenney made Minimalist sculptural work using a variety of materials including electric light fixtures, corrugated tin sheeting, and aluminium. In the late 1960s, during a time when most young artists were abandoning painting for sculpture, performance, or conceptual art, Jenney began producing paintings enclosed by aggressively three-dimensional frames that continued to reveal his early training as a sculptor; in many cases the title of the work was displayed in bold letters on the frame itself. In the first such pictures he created blunt representation through wilfully artless brushwork, which he referred to as ‘bad paintings’. In Them and Us (1969; New York, MOMA), for example, the Cold War is symbolized by the images of a Soviet fighter airplane and an American set in an atmosphere of agitated brushwork. By the 1980s, when a younger generation of artists rediscovered painting, Jenney turned his attention toward the 19th-century landscape painting of the Luminists and the Hudson River School, adopting and refining their techniques (his so-called ‘good paintings’). From ...

(b Excelsior Springs, MO, June 3, 1928; d New York, Feb 12, 1994).

American sculptor, painter, and writer. After a mandatory term in the US Army between 1946 and 1947, Judd spent brief periods studying art at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA (1948–9) and at the Art Students League in New York City (1948 and 1949). He subsequently completed a BA in philosophy (1950–53) at Columbia University and later returned to pursue, but not complete, an MA in art history (1958–60). In 1959, he began writing art criticism for publications such as ARTnews and Arts Magazine and, in the early 1960s, he was better known as a critic than as an artist. In this capacity, he became an enthusiastic supporter of artists such as Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, and Frank Stella, and many of his essays played an important part in critical debates throughout the decade and during subsequent years. After his first one-man exhibition in ...

(b Nice, April 28, 1928; d Paris, June 6, 1962).

French painter, sculptor, performance artist and writer.

He was the son of the Dutch-born painter Fred Klein (b 1898), whose work was representational, and Marie Raymond (b 1908), who developed a reputation in the 1950s as an abstract artist, and whose abstraction was influential on the development of her son’s work. Although he had had no formal art training, he was already making his first serious attempts at painting by 1946 and showing his interest in the absoluteness of colour by formulating his first theories about monochrome. In 1946 he befriended Arman, with whom he was later to be associated in the Nouveau Réalisme movement, and the writer Claude Pascal, whom he met at a judo class. Together they developed their interest in esoteric writing and East Asian religions. Klein became a student of the Rosicrucian Fellowship in 1946 and was influenced both by its mystical philosophy and by judo. In ...

(b Brentford, Middx, Jan 22, 1934).

English painter and sculptor. He was taught drawing and watercolour painting as a child by his maternal grandmother but otherwise received no formal artistic training. In 1957 he moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where he painted and made pots. In 1959 he made his first ‘field’ images (see 1978 exh. cat., figs B, C and D), mystically minimalist records of his response to the natural environment, which set the pattern for all his subsequent work. Between 1961 and 1964 he extended these into Metaphysical Field Paintings (see 1978 exh. cat., fig. L) incorporating hieroglyphic symbols. The paintings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman were to prove a particular inspiration to him, as was his exploration of both Eastern and Western philosophy, psychology, palaeontology, poetry and alchemy. In the mid-1960s he instituted a long series of ‘black’ paintings, which were his best-known contribution to Minimalism. Although they might at first appear to be dark monochromes, they in fact consist of a subtle layering of different colours in a particular sequence as indicated in titles such as ...

(b Texas, 1950).

American sculptor. Lee came to prominence as a Minimalist in the 1970s. An interest in modernism and the monochrome, as well as a hostility to narrative, made the grid her starting point; following which she began to paint predominantly in black. In the mid-1980s she began to divide up her surfaces with dynamic diagonals and introduced more colour. Nututun (1989; see 1992–3 exh. cat., p. 11) is typical of this stage, when her work developed into wall reliefs: an irregular polygon in shape, it is divided into two fragments of amber-coloured, patinated bronze that partially enclose two smaller fragments of green-coloured bronze. By the end of the decade she was making wall reliefs composed of a number of small, shaped and differently coloured panels constructed from various metals, often arranged in large grid compositions. 40 Faults (1989; see 1992–3 exh. cat., pp. 42–3) consists of 40 large green–black patinated metal reliefs, similar to apostrophes in shape. In the late 1990s she began to produce free-standing sculpture, though the forms of the pieces were still predominantly flat and frontal. ...

(b Hartford, CT, Sept 9, 1928; d New York, NY, April 8, 2007).

American sculptor, printmaker, and draughtsman. He studied at Syracuse University, NY, from 1945 to 1949, and between 1951 and 1952 he served in the US Army in Japan and Korea, where he was able to visit oriental shrines, temples, and gardens. In 1953 he moved to New York, where he attended the Cartoonists and Illustrators School. From 1955 to 1956 he worked as a graphic designer for the architect I. M. Pei, and he began to make paintings while continuing to work as a graphic designer. He abandoned painting in 1962 and began to make abstract black-and-white reliefs, followed in 1963 by relief constructions with nested enclosures projecting into space, and box- and table-like constructions. He first made the serial and modular works for which he is best known in 1965, an idea inspired in part by the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. Initially these were wall and floor structures, but in ...

(b Bronxville, NY, Oct 15, 1938).

American painter and printmaker. He studied at Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts, receiving his BFA in 1961, and from 1961 to 1963 at Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, CT. Settling in New York in 1963, in the following year he produced his first single-panel monochromatic paintings, such as Decorative Painting (1964; priv. col., see 1975 exh. cat., pl. 1), through which he contributed to the emerging aesthetic of Minimalism. In such works he reacted against the dominance of gestural techniques in second generation Abstract Expressionism by emphasizing the subtlety of surface and colour within the spatial and structural limits of the rectangle. Bringing together the painterly quality of Abstract Expressionism with the intellectual rigours of Minimalism, Marden achieved a balance between emotional intensity and formal simplicity.

In his early paintings Marden left a bare narrow margin at the bottom edge of the thickly worked surface of oil mixed with wax to allow the observer to be witness to the process. In later works such as ...