A Closer Look:

Minimalism, for all its perceived simplicity, was a movement that was broad in its scope and deep in its philosophical underpinnings. While often regarded as truly reaching full force at the end of the 1950s, Minimalism has a long history in the twentieth century that matures in the middle decades of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Presented in our inaugural 20th / 21st Century Art Evening Sale in New York is a blue-chip selection of post-war masters of Minimalism. Led by Ellsworth Kelly’s monumental Red White from 1968, the auction allows us to trace a short history from Lucio Fontana’s Tagli, represented by a rare and early 1959 parallelogram-shaped canvas, through a 1968 Donald Judd ‘bullnose progression’ sculpture, to one of Sol LeWitt’s iconic Incomplete Open Cubes from 1974.

Ellsworth Kelly, Red White, 1968

Arguably an outlier to Minimalism – an artist whose method was attuned to perception more than the formal problems of painting – Ellsworth Kelly was a titan that defined the latter years of the Modern period. He was a purist, obsessed with shape, composition, and color above all else.

His early abstract canvases were in part inspired by his exposure to Impressionism in Paris, but it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that Kelly would begin working on shaped canvases. This development that saw his paintings grow in scale and ambition, marked a major shift in Kelly’s output. Red White from 1968 is one of the earliest of these large-scale shaped canvases, having made his first in 1966. Evoking the shapes of cigarette packet branding, the stripes of a flag, or even the angular glancing of light across or through objects, it is a deceptively complex painting that does not betray its source material. Here is Minimalism at its most real – a fragment of life distilled to its most pure form.

Lot 15A. Ellsworth Kelly, Red White, 1968. Estimate: $2,000,000 - $4,000,000.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1959

Lucio Fontana’s Tagli, or ‘cuts,’ are undeniable feats of Minimalist painting, despite his being an adjunct to the movement. A pioneer of Spazialismo, Fontana believed that art was destined to be freed from its two-dimensional surface and extend into metaphysical space. His slashed canvases, like Concetto spaziale, Attese, were the greatest expression of his ideology that sought to eradicate classicism. Simplicity and repetition were paramount; clarity of vision and execution was of the upmost importance.

Repetition was a core principle of Minimalist practice, and in Fontana’s case, it was a performance – the sequence of wounds inflicted upon a canvas and upon the very history that it represented.

Lot 17A. Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1959. Estimate: $1,000,000 - $1,500,000.

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968-1972

Presented here, Judd’s Untitled sculpture, referred to as a ‘bullnose progression,’ owing to its rounded elements and incremental construction, captures how Judd employed simple sequences as pure form. He once stated, "My stuff is just a little progression, like adding up the grocery bill […] there's no mathematical mystique to it."

Lot 16A. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968-1972. Estimate: $400,000 - $600,000.

Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cube 7/22, 1974

Conversely to Judd, Sol LeWitt’s aluminum cube speaks more obliquely to geometries and mathematical variations. Titled Incomplete Open Cube 7/22, this large-scale sculpture is a unique work from one of the artists major works: his seminal series from 1974 entitled Variations on Incomplete Open Cubes. Totaling 122 examples, the present work is variation twenty-two of the seven-sided incomplete cubes.

In 1985, critic Rosalind Krauss commented “there is, in Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, as they say, a method to his madness. For what we find is the “system” of compulsion, of the obsessional’s unwavering ritual, with its precision, its neatness, its finicky exactitude, covering over an abyss of irrationality…”.

Lot 18A. Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cube 7/22, 1974. Estimate: $180,000 - $250,000

Register for the 20th / 21st Century Art Evening Sale before 15 May 2024 and follow @bonhamscontemporary on Instagram for more news and exciting updates.