Carl Andre, 6ALINCU18, Glarus, Switzerland, 2001, Detail, Copper and aluminium, 5x400x150 cm. 24-unit rectangle on floor, 5 x 50 x 50 cm (each), (Galerie Greta Meert)
minimalism - 3
the abstract and isolated form of an object
GÜLAY YAŞAYANLAR & MÜMTAZ SAĞLAM
"
IN MINIMALIST SCULPTURE, ROBERT MORRIS, CARL ANDRE AND DONALD JUDD EMPLOY THE OBJECT IN ACCORDANCE WITH AN IDEALISED PRINCIPLE OF ORDER, HARMONY AND TENSION. THIS RELATES TO THE MEANING, SIMPLICITY AND DIRECTNESS OF THE ARRANGEMENT. WHAT TAKES PRECEDENCE HERE IS THE SIMILARITY AND MULTIPLICITY OF FORMS. THIS SITUATION, ACHIEVED THROUGH REPETITION AND DIRECTLY DETERMINING VISUALITY, IS SOMETHING THAT CAN ONLY BE EXPLAINED BY THE RELATIONSHIP ESTABLISHED WITHIN THIS EXPERIENTIAL FIELD BY THE FORMS -WHICH REMAIN WITHIN AND ARE EXPERIENCED IN THE EXPERIENCE, AND WHICH ARE CONTENT WITH THEIR INNER ESSENCE- IN THE WORKS OF DONALD JUDD AND ROBERT MORRIS...
Richard Serra, One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969, Detail, (refabricated 1986), Lead antimony, four plates, Each plate 122 x 122 x 2.5 cm., © 2026 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Minimalist works, conceptualized as a design phenomenon, consider the object and form in their most abstract and reduced state within a spatial sensibility. In Carl Andre, for instance, one can observe how material or object is materialized through a mediation of space, time, and perception, thereby transforming into sculpture. Such minimalist sculptures, which activate holistic perception, aim through Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin toward an aesthetic condition that transcends mass, becoming a form of painting or sculpture that generates spatial dynamism. Richard Serra, in this context, approaches sculpture and space even more closely by rendering formal simplicity visible and effective. It is therefore possible to regard the approaches described as weaving space or carving space as an effort toward purification and withdrawal from external influences, efforts that constitute the very essence of a formalist artistic practice. (2)
space and meaning: minimalist sculpture
Early examples of Minimalist work seem to have swiftly lost their initial purity due to their strategic affiliations. As is frequently noted, this sensibility, having established formal discipline within the framework of style and manner, appears to have abandoned the shared sensitivity evident in artistic representations and turned instead toward the development of individual language, as though seeking to embrace the very aspects it had left incomplete or reacted against. According to Hal Foster, Minimalism stands in opposition both to the privileged high art of Late Modernism and to the spectacle culture of capitalism, and was subsequently suppressed by these very processes.
On closer examination, it becomes apparent that Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd employ the object in Minimalist sculpture according to a principle of idealized order, harmony, and tension. This concerns the meaning, simplicity, and directness of arrangement. What is of primary importance here is the resemblance and multiplicity of forms. This condition, achieved through repetition and directly determining visuality, can only be explained, in the work of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, through the relationship that forms establish within this experiential field, forms which remain within and are lived through experience and content themselves with inner existence. Solely in this respect, the sculptural arrangements of Judd and Morris contain a psychological intimacy of meaning imprisoned within the massive presence of forms, a minimal wholeness and a possibility or density of meaning, and all this within a thoroughly emotionless and sterile environment. (2)
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1977, Installation View, Stainless steel, 4 parts, Each 148x148x148 cm. © Judd Foundation / Adagp, Paris, Photo: Page Wilson.
Carl Andre: Sculptures as Place, 1958-2010, Installation view, May 2014 - March 2025, Dia: Beacon, Beacon New York.
Yet a sterile and non-decorative experience of order corresponds more clearly to the act of reaching a non-rhythmic, mutable appearance that Carl Andre and Richard Serra invest in metal. Richard Serra, in particular, demonstrates in his early work House of Cards that the cube can be achieved, beyond any idealized notion, through an artificial, simple structural surface engagement. Moreover, there is no tedious repetition insistently applied here. Serra rejects this aesthetic and its harmony from the outset. Rather than proposing the cube as a sharp form or a unified structure, he attempts to constitute it as an emotional and spatial arrangement through fragmented, variable, and ordinary metal plates. In doing so, he brings the sculpture forth not as something bound to an introverted, psychological burden, but as an arrangement with resonances in the public, historical and more precisely cultural domain. He ultimately arrives at monumental minimal arrangements that bend the metal surface. In Serra’s works, it should not be forgotten that the archaeology of the metal surface and the metaphorical meanings carried by its texture accompany plain and unadorned continuity through curved, circular sequences.
Carl Andre, throughout this process, produces sculptures that come to symbolize a rupture with Modernism, owing to the extraordinary materials and dimensions of his works. Andre’s multiple-unit object arrangements are likewise rendered meaningful through a paradox: the effort to make raw material sensibilities such as stone and floor tiles serve as components of composite structures, a spiritual dimensionality that conceals their depth and thickness, and a sense of ordinariness. Carl Andre, aligning the idea of sculpture with this principle of surface-material and sequential, variable arrangement, continues to develop this approach as a radical and inexhaustible strategy of resolution.
In summary, Minimalist artists advocate an understanding of art that finds meaning in pure self-sufficiency rather than in the representational adequacy of form, proposing their own internal orders as the work itself. Many of them therefore appear to exist within an objective silence. It is certain that, by foregrounding balance, symmetry, and order as indicators of a rational approach, and through their choice and use of industrial materials that lie outside the established categories of art, they developed an effective artistic practice.
notlar
1 Hal Foster, Gerçeğin Geri Dönüşü / The Return of the Real, Translation: Esin Hoşsucu, Ayrıntı Publication, May 2009, İstanbul. sf. 63-69.
2 Bkz. Rosalind Krause, Modern Heykelin Dehlizleri / Passages in Modern Sculpture, Translation: Sibel Erduran, Everest Publication, October 2021, İstanbul, sf.302.
Gülay Yaşayanlar & Mümtaz Sağlam Copyright © March 2026, All Rights Reserved.
COLLECTION EXHIBITION
Exhibition view from Minimal, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, 2nd Floor: Materialism, Gallery 5.
BOURSE DE COMMERCE / PARIS
Nobuo Sekine, "Phase of Nothingness - Water," 1969/2012, steel, lacquer, water, 120 × 120 cm. Pinault Collection. © Nobuo Sekine Estate. View of the exhibition “Minimal,” Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Minimal, Editor: Jessica Morgan, Contributors: Emma Lavigne, Jessica Morgan, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Frances Morris, Alexandra Bordes, Clara Meister, Teresa Kittler, Nicolas-Xavier Ferrand ve Alexis Lowry, Pinault Collection & Éditions Dilecta, Paris, 2025.
4 ESSAYS ON MINIMALISM / BY GÜLAY YAŞAYANLAR & MÜMTAZ SAĞLAM
MINIMALIST ARTISTS
DONALD JUDD
Donald Judd, Untitled, (Detail), 1965, Galvanized steel Dimensions, 297,7 × 101,6 × 76,2 cm NMSK 1927 Collection Materialitet, Art © Donald Judd Foundation/Bildupphovsrätt 2026, Sweden/VAGA, New York
Donald Judd (1928-1994) describes his series of works, which shifted from painting to sculpture and consisted of a few identical elements mounted on the wall through radical experiments, as “specific objects,” in accordance with the term he used in his 1965 manifesto. Judd’s works, created with an extremely simple and radical approach to abstraction, have a distant spatial effect. Conceiving his objects in an equivalent relationship with space, Judd envisions a minimalist and unsettling plane derived from form and structural formation. He thus spreads a spirit of minimal transcendence, legitimized by creating a potential for questioning the causality and uniformity of the perceptible, across the object and space. By withdrawing the sensory perception caused by things and thoughts in an abstract and ambiguous relational environment, he recreates the expanded rigidity emitted by the pure image within an aesthetic mise-en-scène. With his hard lines and angular boundaries, Donald Judd leaves nothing behind from the plane of perceived consistency and immanence in the context of constantly repeating new impossible forms.
ROBERT MORRIS
Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, Exhibition at the Green Gallery, December 1964 to January 1965, New York. Image: Rosalind Krauss and Thomas Krens, (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1994)
Robert Morris, (1931-2018) He radically simplified and developed the concept of minimalism that emerged in New York in the early 1960s. Having begun his career as a painter, he adopted a new style consisting of sculptural installations and, through a series of published articles, helped to define the minimalist movement… In fact, his approach challenges traditional art-historical classifications and movements. It is evident that he views his artistic practice as a single, coherent work, an ongoing project, and a sustainable, philosophical-artistic experiment. All his works aim to create a complex, sometimes paradoxical space, independent of the medium used; and this space restores to the viewer processes of experience and perception that seem inaccessible today. In fact, these works, which concern the relationship between the visible and the known, are shaped by philosophical scepticism, prioritising a variable principle of representation based on experimental propositions. Despite his methodological rigour, Morris’s practice is therefore highly subjective, imbued with intense introspection and an emphasis on the quest for selfhood.
DAN FLAVIN
Dan Flavin, Alternate Diagonals of March 2, 1964 (to Don Judd), (Detail) 1964, red and yellow fluorescent light, 365.8 cm (diagonal), Pinault Collection. © Dan Flavin / Adagp, Paris, 2025. View of the exhibition “Minimal,” Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur.
Dan Flavin (1933–1996) is considered one of the pioneers of Minimal Art for his work with fluorescent light beams and his radical and innovative sculptures. In the early 1960s, he experimented with fluorescent light, a mysterious material that suggested simplicity and singularity, emphasized its form and therefore itself, and possessed independent qualities. With this material, he created radically simple and transformative light installations that led to a new breakthrough. His work to Don Judd (1964), found in the Pinault Collection, consists of neon lights arranged in an alternating cross pattern. Here, the cross pattern extending along the wall brings together industrial aesthetics, the sensuality of the material, and the intensity of the light, conveying a palpable sense of energy that alters the viewer’s perception of space and draws their gaze. This work is the first in which Flavin systematically used the wall sconces and standard fluorescent tubes found in stores. It transforms an everyday object into a work of art and reconfigures the spatial experience.
SOL LEWITT
Sol LeWitt, Installation view, Paula Cooper Gallery, September 2016. [https://www.paulacoopergallery.com/exhibitions/sol-lewitt2#tab:slideshow]
Sol LeWitt (1928-2004) One of the leading figures of Minimal Art, LeWitt is known for his wall drawings or geometric sculptures, which he referred to as “structures.” By creating multiple variations of his structures, LeWitt explored a geometric and mathematical system using industrial materials such as aluminum, metal, or concrete. A key figure in the evolution of Conceptual Art, LeWitt insisted that the idea, the diagram, and the planning of these structures were the artwork itself. In doing so, the actual implementation of the sculptures—the objects themselves—was less important than the concept of the structure.
RICHARD SERRA
Richard Serra, Joe, 1999, (Detail) Weathering steel, Outer spiral approximately 163 x 576 x 480 inches © Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Courtyard, Photograph by Robert Pettus
Richard Serra (1938-2024) is one of the first Minimalist artists known for his monumental sculptures. He uses industrial materials such as steel to create simple, continuous surfaces that bend or curve in space. He attempts to influence our perception of space and dimension by compelling the viewer to enter the sculpture. The rusty textures that form on the plate surfaces lend a pictorial quality to the conceptual origins of his artistic practice. To the extent that he avoids ostentation, a monumental effect based on the structural and graphic integrity of the form is always present. That is why Serra’s metal plates have an extremely disturbing, metaphysical, and existential quality. Arrangements consisting of massive panels, especially flat walls or irregular rows or rising, falling, sloping narrow passages, resembling a labyrinth, take on a chaotic quality. They persistently make the viewer feel the threatening space of the sculpture. In this process, the aura of the sculpture enters into a psychological and intellectual concentration within the mediation of heavy mass reality.
MINIMALIZM / 4 BOOKS
Daniel Marzona, Minimal Art, Tashen Deutschland, 25. Edition, German, Hardcover, 200 pages, 2009.
James Meyer, Minimalism / Art and Polemics in the Sixties, Yale University Press, English, Paperback, 340 pages, August 2004.
Minimalism, Edited by James Meyer, Phaidon Press, English, Soft Cover, 200 pages, June 2010.
Minimalism, Edited by James Meyer, Phaidon Press, English, Paperback, 304 pages, March 2005.
MİNİMALİZM / DAVID BATCHELOR
David Batchelor, Minimalizm (Modern Sanat Akımları), Translation: Tüles Üresin, Editor: Talha Lafçı, Powerback, 95 pages, Türkçe, Hayalperest Publishing, First Edition, March 2025, İstanbul.
First published by Tate Publishing in 1977, Minimalism was also published in Turkish by Hayalperest Publishing in 2025. (1) Written by the painter and author David Batchelor, this book is a highly compelling work that distinguishes itself from publications aimed at the general reader by examining the movement within the context of its overall development and its key figures. Minimalism, which has been examined in detail by art writers such as Hal Foster, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried, proceeds through a two-part analytical framework in which David Batchelor adopts a distinct perspective, addressing contexts such as the establishment of visual quality and unity, and the representation and transformation of material or object. It evaluates the differences in approach among the five artists representing the movement -Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt- through a comparative analysis of the terms, concepts and principles of practice they established. Without shying away from tackling problematic areas such as meaning, emotion and psychological impact -which are particularly evident in definitions of minimalist art- it seeks to explain the images of identity and difference experienced during a brief yet enduring process through a discussion of causality. In the final chapter, titled ‘On Texts and Contexts’, the author examines the current state of the post-minimalist era, as exemplified by artists such as Richard Serra and Eva Hesse, and focuses on radical critiques of minimalist art, placing particular emphasis on the critical perspective offered by Anna Chave. (2) This study, which is supplemented by a bibliography surveying key publications on minimalism in art literature as of 1997, stands before us as a fundamental reference work thanks to its comprehensive content, fluid language, insightful observations and numerous high-quality visual aids.
1 David Batchelor, Minimalism (Movements in Modern Art), Powerback, 96 pages, English, Tate Publishing, First Edition, 1997, London.
2 See. Ann C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power”, Arts Magazine, Issue: 64, September 1990, pg. 44-63.
MINIMALISM / MINIMALIST SCULPTURE
İZMİR - LONDON
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