In the 1960s, the world was still recovering from World War II, while enduring the Cold War. With American imperialism and Soviet influence, new counterculture movements—against not only capitalism and consumerism but also Soviet culture—emerged and influenced the visual arts.

In this gallery, the exhibition of this collection starts with works from the 1960s, including the first Minimalist experiments, based on ideas of plainness, simplicity, and neutrality, and made with industrial materials. These works presuppose an interaction with and new forms of perception from the viewer, offering the latter new experiences. This contemporary tendency—to turn to space, to embody and/or transform the artwork—was also explored in Post-Minimalist and Conceptual practices.

“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” wrote Sol LeWitt in his 1967 article “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Indeed, 1960s art treasures the idea, the concept, and the intention at the expense of the image and the established object of art. The point is to simultaneously make and reflect on art. Of crucial importance is also the employment of new technologies of contemporary production—photography, video, television, the computer, and so on—which brought new elements to the realm of social and political debate and considerably broadened their expressive possibilities.

A short-lived artistic period dating from 1963 to 1969, Minimalism was a movement which questioned the status of the object in a concrete space as well as the role of its observer. This questioning played a central role in subsequent changes and created an opening for understanding the artwork as a point at which various performativities converged. The works on display in this gallery are inseparable from the space and time in which they are presented and from those observing them. Giving rise to this process of sharing a relationship with an artwork, they are mental exercises that engage with and transform notions of space and time.

Rita Lougares