Poetry of Reduction

The exhibition - which is running in parallel to the presentation of Dan Flavin’s œuvre and will put it in a wider contemporary context— shows the central subjects of this neo-avantgarde art movement from the 1960s and 1970s using a representative selection of Minimal, Conceptual and Land Art from the collection holdings. The thematic structure of the presentation not only reflects the rejection of tradi- tional art genres, but the turn towards the new forms of art relating to space, the body and the viewer that reflect on their own institutional and social conditions. The intentional quest for clarity and analytical precision associated with these concerns is usually visible in a reduced formal language though this does not exclude sensuality or poetics. On the contrary, it presents them in a new light. 
Thus the sober forms of Minimal Art, which locked horns with the illusionism of painting, contain impressive sensual and poetic aspects. The reduction of forms allows the subjective act of perceiving them to be experienced as a tensile relationship between the work, the room and one’s own physicality. As Donald Judd himself remarked, the complexity of the work is heightened precisely because of the simplicity of means.