The Minimalist Art Movement: Characteristics of Minimalism & Famous Minimalist Artists

Minimalism in art first appeared in the mid-20th century.

A radical departure from Abstract Expressionism's gestural excess, the artists associated with minimalism (including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt) rejected personal expression and painterly gesture, favoring objectivity and formal clarity.

From geometric abstraction on canvas to industrial sculptures in monochrome, their work emphasized direct spatial experience over illusion, reshaping the viewer’s relationship to art as something physical and present.

Minimalist Movement Cheat Sheet

• Minimalism in art emerged in 1960s New York as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism’s emotional excess.
• Artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Agnes Martin emphasized clarity, geometry, and objectivity.
• The movement drew on influences from Bauhaus, De Stijl, Constructivism, and architecture/industrial design.
• Characteristics include: geometric forms, repetition, industrial materials, clean lines, and limited color palettes.
• Minimalist works often highlight direct spatial experience—art as an object in real space rather than illusion.
• Landmark exhibitions like “Primary Structures” (1966, Jewish Museum, NY) brought minimalism public recognition.
• Minimalism’s legacy reshaped modern art, paving the way for conceptual art, post-minimalism, and land art, while influencing design and architecture.

What Is Minimalism in Art?

Emerging in the 1960s, minimalism challenged the reigning supremacy of Abstract Expressionism (aka “AbEx”), while anticipating the more socially engaged attitudes later associated with conceptualism.

While conceptual art would tend to downplay objects in favor of ideas, Abstract Expressionism, for its part, seemed to overstate the role of subjectivity in art. Between these two extremes, the minimalist art movement (or “minimal art”) embraced visual clarity, objectivity, and a tactile reduction to essentials.

Painters associated with this style—among them Frank Stella and Agnes Martin, both of whom were somewhat reluctant to carry the minimalist label—broke away from dominant painting trends by pursuing what might be described as an extreme form of abstraction.

They rejected the personal mythologizing that featured so heavily in AbEx. Instead, these artists focused on the essential features that made an art-object a thing of interest in the purest sense.

As the name suggests, minimalist visual vocabularies prioritized an ideal of minimizing overt "personal expression" in works of art.

Often using stark color palettes and embracing geometric shapes, minimalist artists pioneered a late modernist aesthetic that foregrounded concreteness, restraint, and the mathematics of space.

History & Development of Minimalism

Dissatisfied with the New York art world's fixation on gestural, emotionally expressive paintings, a loosely knit group of young artists began making works that emphasized simple, geometric forms and industrial materials.

They wanted to highlight the objectivity of objects, rather than whatever symbolic or emotional contents they suggested.

Artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt drew inspiration mainly from architecture, industrial design, and engineering principles. Earlier European movements such as De Stijl and Bauhaus, which sought to merge art into everyday environments, also profoundly influenced their development toward minimalism.

Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, in particular, pointed the way to a new, more rational, and ordered form of art. Their use of pure forms and geometric objects was a welcome reprieve after the chaos of World War II.

By 1966, minimalism started gaining its first glimmers of public notoriety with a landmark exhibition at The Jewish Museum in New York, appropriately titled “Primary Structures.”

Characteristics of Minimalist Art

In many respects, minimalism restated many of the ideals that Abstract Expressionism claimed for itself as a movement, but which rarely panned out in practice.

With abstract expressionist art, artists sought to strip painting down to its essential elements, removing all unnecessary ornamentation and decorative gestures. While some works by AbEx painters did fulfill this promise in a grand sense, for the most part, the artists who turned to minimalism felt that AbEx paintings were bloated and overly complex.

Minimalist art seeks to eliminate secondary elements that don't serve a core artistic purpose. To this end, it downplayed subjectivity and the materiality of paint and pigment in favor of basic geometric forms like squares, rectangles, circles, and straight lines.

In pursuit of the most uncluttered visual statements possible, a new crop of artists was working with the most direct, physical, and impersonal aspects of our perception of space.

Repetition and Seriality

Abstract Expressionists' type of frenetic holism, called “all-over composition,” was replaced in minimalist art by systematic repetition.

Instead of gestural swathes of paint creating expressive fields of emotional resonance, minimalism introduced repeated forms, patterns, and modular systems to establish a sense of rhythm and structure that extended beyond the boundaries of a canvas into the surrounding physical space.

Minimalist works typically emphasized a single gesture—a serial arrangement of identical or similar elements that did not so much resolve into a coherent whole, as expand outward, beyond what could be contained within a frame or isolated sculpture.

Often employing modular parts that could be extended or recombined, minimalist works frequently engaged with or responded to the architectural features of the spaces in which they were shown.

Within these compositionally deliberate systems, subtle variations were sometimes introduced to foreground repetition itself as the central visual interest.

Industrial Materials and Fabrication

Quite apart from requiring conventionally frameable works, like AbEx or landscape art, or dematerializing the art object completely, as in many conceptual art practices, minimalism preferred objects and materials that might almost go unnoticed in the spaces where they took shape.

A preference for manufactured materials like steel, aluminum, plexiglass, and concrete made minimalist works nearly indistinguishable from industrial fabrications, and at times difficult to recognize as “art.”

The material properties of minimalist installations were typically quite ordinary. Because they weren’t constructed or arranged to express any overt symbolic meaning, they often reproduced the same visual logic as the architectural features surrounding them.

This embrace of machine-made precision over handcrafted irregularities allowed minimalist works to engage with their spatial environments in unprecedented ways.

A minimalist work could be a hole dug into the gallery floor, as in Michael Heizer’s “North, East, South, West” (1967–2002), which comments on spatial depth in a way no illusionistic painting ever could; or it could be a metal block placed unobtrusively on the floor, as in Carl Andre’s “Lever” (1966).

The fact that such works were often produced through industrial fabrication rather than shaped by the artist’s hand dispelled the myth that art must visibly announce itself as something elevated above everyday life.

Geometric Forms and Clean Lines

Doing away with expression, with the intervention of the artist’s hand, and with any appeal to beauty or even functionality, minimalist works came to be characterized by pure geometric shapes and mathematical relationships.

The organic or biomorphic forms associated with Surrealism, botanical art, and abstract art gave way to precise, hard edges and smooth, almost featureless surfaces. Even when artists associated with minimalism (such as Frank Stella or Agnes Martin) did paint, they did so in a way that gave their paintings an almost architectural quality.

Many of Frank Stella’s paintings are literally three-dimensional works that project off a wall toward the viewer. They can be observed from the side, the front, or even the back—Stella challenges the relativity of these vantage points in his unique creations.

Agnes Martin, for her part, is known for her grid-like paintings that feature meticulously rendered colored surfaces, each intimation of color existing as its own discrete continuum rather than shading off into another hue.

Monochromatic or Limited Color Palettes

The use of a single color—or, at the very least, a severely restricted color palette—has become a hallmark of minimalist art. What little color is used, as in works by Agnes Martin, is often applied to highlight form’s relationship with color generally.

With a preference for neutrals like black, white, gray, and earth tones, minimalist paintings ensure that color serves a purely structural rather than expressive purpose.

Colors themselves are almost thing-like: flat, uniform, and without gradation.

Influential Minimalist Artists

Frank Stella

Heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism before becoming a key precursor to minimalism, Frank Stella’s work helped define minimalist painting. While not averse to color, Stella abandoned the gestural qualities of his pre-minimalist period in favor of hard-edged geometric abstractions—often rendered on irregularly shaped canvases painted with systematic color arrangements.

Throughout his career, Stella maintained that space itself should serve as the fundamental theme of art, and that painting could engage this theme more directly by discarding illusionistic pretenses. Paintings were objects, and should be worked on as such.

While Stella’s early black pinstripe paintings can reasonably be called minimalist abstraction, his later works—where colorful geometries are typically set in relief on wall-mounted, three-dimensional surfaces—are far more baroque and maximal.

These works illustrate his conviction that paintings were spatial objects in and of themselves rather than windows looking out onto some imagined scene.

Channeling Frank Stella's Colors & Shapes

Agnes Martin

Although she eschewed the term “minimalist,” Agnes Martin was nevertheless a fellow traveler in the evolution of minimalist painting. 

Relatively early works like “Friendship” (1963), “White Flower” (1960), and “The Tree” (1964) accomplish something comparable to what Robert Ryman did when he painted white on a white backdrop.

The significant difference is that while Martin’s minimalist contemporaries—not only Ryman but Ellsworth Kelly, too—were more concerned with surface, structure, and the physical presence of paint, Martin, through repetitive mark-making and understated color schemes, was invested in articulating a hidden poetry buried inside real-life objects—something intangible but deeply felt.

Donald Judd

An important theorist and artist, Donald Judd is arguably the most frequently cited figure in discussions of minimalist and large-scale art.

One of the first artists to fully embrace large-scale, industrially fabricated forms, Judd rejected traditional categories of sculpture and developed systematic approaches to form, color, and spatial relationships that deliberately avoid compositional hierarchy.

His “Untitled” (1967) box series—produced in various materials—and his monumental “100 Works in Mill Aluminum” (1982–1986), permanently installed at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, exemplify this approach: industrial materials shaped into precise, geometric configurations that maintain modular flexibility while asserting their presence as autonomous objects.

Dan Flavin

The honesty and directness implied by minimalist art—where the formalist, almost tactile qualities of industrial materials are consistently preferred over the illusionistic devices featured in painting—reach a kind of peak in Dan Flavin's art.

While his minimalist contemporaries such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre were having metals fabricated in bulk, Flavin was visiting local shops and filling out orders for fluorescent lighting fixtures.

As Flavin saw it, it wasn’t so much the lights themselves that mattered, but that light itself could serve as a legitimate sculptural medium. In career-spanning works such as his “Monument for V. Tatlin” (1964–1990), systematic arrangements of colored fluorescent tubes pose the question of whether industrial materials can produce sublime aesthetic experiences.

Using commercially available fluorescent light fixtures as his sole artistic medium, Flavin’s work is not without a touch of wry humor. His “Untitled” ode to his longtime friend and colleague Don Judd, simulates a Judd installation while exploring how light can signify past and present realities, even when no overt message is being communicated.

Legacy of the Minimalist Art Movement

Minimalism’s refusal of expressive excess, narrative content, or symbolic interpretations reshaped the priorities of modern art.

The artists associated with the movement weren’t trying to represent the world so much as reframe how we perceive it—inviting viewers into direct encounters with form, space, and the material underpinnings of everyday environments.

Doing this, minimalism helped clear the way for postmodern movements that questioned authorship, objectivity, permanence, and the cultural values that regulate our experience of art.

Even as its uniformity and austerity have been widely critiqued, minimalism’s influence endures: less can still be more when approached with clarity and precision.