Marking Time: Process in Minimal Abstraction

During the 1960s and 1970s, many artists working with abstraction rid their styles of compositional, chromatic, and virtuosic flourishes. As some turned toward such minimal approaches, a singular emphasis on their interaction with materials emerged. The resulting pieces invite viewers to imaginatively reenact aspects of the creative process.

What unites the artists featured in Marking Time: Process in Minimal Abstraction is not necessarily a shared belief in what art should accomplish or express. Rather, the works on display reveal the artists’ implicit trust in viewers’ capacity to put themselves in the artist’s position as they consider the object in front of them. Whether characterized by interlocking brushstrokes, a pencil moved through wet paint, or a pin repeatedly pushed through paper, the works make visible the ways in which they were produced, allowing for an intimate understanding of the duration, intensity, and rhythm that each required.

Featuring paintings and works on paper by Agnes Martin, Roman Opałka, Park Seo-Bo, and others, Marking Time explores how drawing attention to the creative process fosters a distinctively empathetic mode of engagement.

Marking Time: Process in Minimal Abstraction is organized by David Max Horowitz, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Major support for Marking Time: Process in Minimal Abstraction is provided by Elizabeth Richebourg Rea.

"Marking Time: Process in Minimal Abstraction" opens at the Guggenheim Museum

Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture No. 55-73, 1973. Graphite and oil on canvas, 195.3 x 290.7 x 3.8 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, the Samsung Foundation of Culture, 2015.50.

NEW YORK, NY.- From December 18, 2019, through July 20, 2020, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Marking Time: Process in Minimal Abstraction. Featuring a selection of nearly a dozen paintings and works on paper from the Guggenheim collection by Agnes Martin, Roman Opałka, Park Seo-Bo, and others, this presentation explores how artists operating in a variety of contexts foregrounded process as they forged new approaches to abstraction.

The exhibition is organized by David Max Horowitz, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

During the 1960s and 1970s, many artists working with abstraction rid their styles of compositional, chromatic, and virtuosic flourishes. As some turned toward such minimal approaches, a singular emphasis on their physical engagement with materials emerged. The resulting pieces—whether characterized by interlocking brushstrokes, a pencil moved through wet paint, or a pin repeatedly pushed through paper—invite viewers to imaginatively reenact aspects of the creative process. Doing so fosters an intimate understanding of these works, as it allows for interpretations based on an appreciation of the duration, intensity, and rhythm that each required. This focus on making process visible had become more prominent during the 1950s with the international rise of gestural abstraction, but it had never been accentuated so insistently nor made so accessible until artists began to explore its possibilities in the following decades.

The individuals who made this effect central to their art are associated with a variety of global movements. What unites them is not necessarily a shared belief in what art should accomplish or express, nor participation in a closely linked interpersonal network. Instead, it is their implicit trust in viewers’ capacity to put themselves in the artist’s position as they consider the object in front of them. It is a distinctively empathetic mode of engagement that relies on an awareness of oneself as inhabiting both a body and time, and, perhaps even more importantly, a consciousness of the embodied experiences of others.