This summer, Zwirner & Wirth will present Minimal, an exhibition of works from the 1960s and 70s, which demonstrate some of the main themes and forms of minimalism.
Dan Flavin, The Barbara Roses, 1962-71, is a visual pun on the name of the American art historian Barbara Rose, who was an intimate friend of Flavin. Created concurrently with Flavin’s early "Icons", this work is among his first sculptures using electric light.
Donald Judd's Untitled, (22 November,1968), box construction, was created during the years Judd began to explore industrial materials such as copper, brass, stainless steel and Plexiglas. The work embodies a palpable, visual tension between the rigorousness of its physical geometry and the opulent effects of the materials, where opacity and translucency, reflections and transparency coexist.
On the West coast, John McCracken was also experimenting with materials in the 1960s. Red Plank of 1964, is McCracken's signature form. Consisting of highly polished enamel resin and fiberglass, the plank creates a visual paradox as the object’s presence is simultaneously physical and immaterial. Moving painting into sculpture, the plank exists in a phenomenological space between the second and third dimension.
ABCD 5 by Sol Lewitt, is a floor structure from the "serial project No. 1 (ABCD)" series. Embodying the purist geometries of the International Architecture Movement, the work consists of multipart pieces laid upon a grid constituting a succinct set of open and closed formal variations. The work is a three-dimensional realization of Lewitt's rejection of the conventional boundaries between painting, sculpture, drawing and architecture.
In Card-Index Filing Cabinet, Part I, of 1975, Hanne Darboven transcribes periods of time and texts into schematic visual symbols. Composed of 10 panels each containing 30 sheets of paper, the work is a complex system of translating data into visual form. Time as a standardized system is set off against the subjectivity of the artist’s hand notations, creating a tension between the concept of time and how it is interpreted by each individual.
Works will also be presented by Carl Andre, Andre Cadere, Robert Morris and Lawrence Weiner.