The Las Vegas Art Museum (LVAM) will present the exhibition, Southern California Minimalism through January 21—March 31, 2006. The exhibition will feature abstract paintings and sculptures produced primarily in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by artists working in and around the Los Angeles area. Artists represented include Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Judy Chicago, Ron Davis, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, and James Turrell.

“These California artists adopted the fundamental tenants of Minimal Art as it originated on the East Coast in the late 1950s and early ’60s,” notes Libby Lumpkin, Consulting Executive Director of LVAM who organized the exhibition. “Their works reveal the tendency among California’s avant-garde to romanticize and glamorize Minimalism through perceptual ambiguities of light and color.”

Minimalism is one of the landmark movements of the twentieth century and the most influential movement to have originated on American soil. As it developed in the 1960s and ’70s, its principles represented a profound shift in the way in which art objects were conceived. Minimalist artists dispensed with traditional representation and notions of transcendence, generally replacing the complex, handmade, intuitively nuanced forms and compositions of Modern Art with monochromatic, industrially manufactured, geometric forms arranged in simple modular or serial configurations. The impersonal, generally austere objects were designed to be perceived literally, in real space and time. When confronted with Minimal Art, spectators become conscious of surrounding space and of their own experience of encountering the object.