MINIMALISMO, POSMINIMALISMO Y CONCEPTUALISMO / 60’ - 70’

Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 6 - October 14, 2019

 

The following exhibition is devoted to the sculptures, videos and drawings of five major figures from this period—Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Fred Sandback, Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham—who pioneered the Minimal, Postminimal and Conceptual Art movements. Though these artists often worked in different mediums, showed in different galleries and lived in different cities, their output demonstrates a shared intellectual ethos: a desire to engage the viewer, both physically and mentally, on a deeper, more profound level than had ever been possible through traditional mediums. Often using the most economical of visual and cognitive means, LeWitt, Flavin, Sandback, Graham and Nauman challenge our perceptions of space, time and even the fundamental nature of art as we know it. Their contributions to the canon of art history cannot be underestimated and their legacy continues to grow today, as contemporary artists around the world persist in the distillation of art to its most essential form.

America of the 1960s and 1970s was a place of drastic political and social change. While the nation came to grips with the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, race riots and the Feminist movement, a parallel cultural revolution was brewing. Minimalismo, posminimalismo y conceptualismo / 60' y 70’ traces the unprecedented advancements made by American artists during this tumultuous, fertile period. At a time when the art market was booming and postwar painters were kings, the avant-garde artists in this exhibition produced work that seemed more like everyday objects than ‘Art’: lightbulbs adhered to the wall, yarn hung from the ceiling, metal grids stretching across the floor. Collapsing the space between art and life, these contemporary renegades challenged our preconceptions about what art is, how its made and what it does. In so doing, they introduced a new mode of art-making, one that was more experimental, interactive and concept-driven than ever before.