![]() ![]() Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. All in all, Wool’s approach evinces a love-hate relationship with painting-and abstraction in particular.Visual arts movement Tony Smith, Free Ride, 1962, 6'8 × 6'8 × 6'8, Museum of Modern Art (New York City) This idea became clearer in Wool’s subsequent works built out of elements from his previous paintings, some which were silkscreened onto the canvas as halftone photos, or defaced with spray-painted marks, or wiped with turpentine-soaked cloths. But he though of his paintings as abstractions, or more precisely, images of abstraction, a postmodern conceit which recognized that the genre had become figurative in a way thanks to endless reproductions in art books, magazines and museum postcards. For Wool, attitude was form, to borrow a critical notion of the time, and something about the nihilism in his work comported spiritually with Reagan-era excess. He also stenciled paintings with cryptic words, such as TRBL or FOOL as well as more recognizable phrases, such as HELTER SKELTER, borrowed from pop culture. Over the past couple of decades, Marden has become better know for filling large all over compositions with sinuous looping lines that are meant to be taken as stylized references to the gestural marks of Abstract Expressionism.Ĭhristopher Wool emerged onto the New York art scene during the late 1980s, and created a splash with black-and-white enamel compositions that featured wallpaper patterns created with the sort of textured paint rollers used to decorate tenement hallways. ![]() But while the paintings appeared flat, the encaustic left subtle traces of the artist’s efforts to smooth the surface. But he’s always been commitment to material and process, evident in his early preference for encaustic, a technique using pigment mixed into hot wax that then cools hardens after application, as in his initial monochromes created in muted colors found in nature. Over his career, however, Marden has shifted his approach time and again, making his style too eclectic to pin down. More to the point, he managed to do so as an artist who made paintings at a time when the medium was considered dead, given the surfeit of new, revolutionary genre like performance and video art that promised to upend the artistic order. Marden first emerged in the late 1960s with monochromatic canvases that were critically hailed for embodying the Minimalist spirit of the period. ![]() ![]() But regardless of who originated it, abstraction fundamentally changed the history of art, as you can see by exploring our list of the best abstract artists of all time. The final break with representation occurred during the early 1900s and teens, and various artists-Vassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich-have been credited with being the first to develop pure abstraction. Beginning with early proponents like James Abbot McNeil Whistler (of Whistler’s Mother fame), this focus on the intrinsic properties of art became tighter and tighter through a progression of styles from Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Cubism and Expressionism. This also meant a divorce from the centuries-long role that Western art had played in promoting the church and the state. Abstraction’s roots go back to the 19th century and the emergence of art for art’s sake, a philosophy which argued for the idea that painting and sculpture should free itself from naturalism to concentrate on the substance of art itself-material, texture, composition, line, tone and color. It remains an important aspect of contemporary art, and prime examples-both historical and new-can be found in at NYC’s premier art museums, including MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Whitney. It’s been more than a century since abstraction emerged as a major (and for a while the dominant) genre in the annals of 20th century. ![]()
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