MADISON, WI.- Minimalist Art Now is the first museum exhibition tracing the development of minimalist painting and drawing from 1980 to the present. The works in this exhibition emphasize a particular suspicion of systems that organize and thereby limit art and thought. The subtle ways in which the minimalists of today celebrate the beauty of mathematical, geometric, and logical formalism—while questioning those very methods and goals—demonstrate the tension of our relations to conceptual and technical systems. The works also elevate the importance of process on its own terms, focusing attention on the technicalities of their own materials and methods rather than ignoring or obscuring these details of composition.

Process can take the form of language-based or formal symbolic content, as in the layered film subtitles of Stefana McClure (Irish, b. 1959, lives in U.S ) and schema for documentation of baseball pitches by Janet Cohen (American, b. 1960). Compositional method can also depend more neutrally upon the residue (intentional and accidental) of repeated physical gestures as in the gampi paper pieces of Jill Baroff, the dripped-paint grids of Teo Gonzales, the monoprints of Louise Wiesenfarth, and the rock circumscriptions of John Cage.

Patterns and divergences among images emerge and disappear upon the surface of the enormous textile-like vertical drawings of Tayo Heuser (American, b. 1954), the intimate, tightly controlled grids of Agnes Martin (American, b. Canada 1912), John Andrews (American, b. 1960), and Robert Jack (American, b.1971), and rule-governed drawings of Gerhard Mayer (German, b. 1962). Color relationships receive very different treatments in Kate Shepherd’s (American, b. 1961) painted panels with their slightly distorted geometric imagery and Stephan Gritsch’s (Swiss, b. 1951) weave of finely painted colored lines. The tension between machine-made and human-made is explored in the fastidiously dotted yet whimsical canvases of Mark Ferguson (American, b. Japan 1964), the burnt-paper images of Davide Cantoni (Italian, b. 1965), and the delicate mappings of Marco Maggi (Uruguayan, b. 1957). Finally, craft and domestic traditions are delightfully questioned and transformed in the inventive woven paper wall-sculptures of Seong Chun (Korean, b. 1968), and the bold and tender Letters to the Mother of Elena del Rivero (American, b. Spain, b. 1952).

In the minimal art of today we can experience directly the relation of human beings to formal systems. Despite the rigorous—perhaps even obsessive or compulsive —methodologies of these works, they are deeply personal, attempting always to privilege the human presence of the artist and viewer within the work and our experience of it. From its origins in the exquisite grids of Agnes Martin and subtle white canvases of Robert Ryman, the single most important and lasting contribution of 1960s minimalism is its subtly human mode of questioning. Minimalist Art Now presents a study of methods by which artists question and recast the role of systems in art and life.