Latest news with #Minimalism
New York Times
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Bill Dilworth, Caretaker of ‘The New York Earth Room,' Is Dead at 70
How much does it weigh? Does it leak? Does anything grow here? For 35 years, Bill Dilworth tended a Manhattan loft filled with dirt, otherwise known as 'The New York Earth Room,' a monumental artwork by Walter De Maria, a lion of Minimalism who died in 2013. And for decades, Mr. Dilworth, an affable abstract artist, patiently fielded those and other questions, noting the more intriguing ones, and the visitors who posed them, in a notebook he kept for that purpose. 'What is this for?' was a recurring question. His answer: 'It's forever.' The Earth Room is an extravagant, startling artwork — 280,000 pounds of dark, chocolaty soil, about two feet deep — on the second floor of an early artists' co-op in a former manufacturing building on Wooster Street, in the heart of SoHo. It was installed in 1977, in what used to be the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, and it was intended to be temporary, a three-month-long exhibit. But Mr. Friedrich — who had formed the Dia Art Foundation (now the Dia Center for the Arts) in 1974, with his wife, Philippa de Menil, and others, as an organization dedicated to supporting work like Mr. De Maria's — decided that 'The New York Earth Room' should be one of its showpieces. It opened to the public, free of charge, in 1980. Since then, the artists who colonized the building and the area have mostly moved on, and the neighborhood, like the city itself, has evolved. 'That's what makes the Earth Room so radical,' Mr. Dilworth said in a video posted on the Dia website. 'It's here, and it remains the same.' Mr. Dilworth was a bit radical himself: an artist who shunned the art world, but who spent most of his waking hours in one of its most important works. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Thornton Willis, Who Brought Emotion to Geometric Painting, Dies at 89
Like his paintings, Thornton Willis was unassuming but indomitable. Asked by an interviewer in 2019 how he had felt about movements, like Minimalism and Conceptualism, that threatened to replace his medium with newer approaches, Mr. Willis replied, 'I just kept painting,' before adding, with characteristic humor and modesty, 'So did a lot of other people, though.' What he was painting — or, in a sense, defending — was a unique brand of geometric abstraction imbued with the energy, personality and intense material focus of the midcentury New York School. Beginning with horizontal stripes and proceeding through zigzags, wedges, lattices, triangles and crenelated shapes, often rendered on very large canvases, Mr. Willis spent a lifetime patiently excavating the problems and possibilities of the painted surface — in terms of color, texture, process and space. His first well-known series, which he called 'Slat' paintings, was made on the floor with four-inch paint rollers. For a few years in the 1970s, he gained widespread recognition and success with his wedges — upright, mesa-like shapes reminiscent of box-cutter blades. Then he dropped them in favor of overlapping lines and patterns of triangles that evoked isometric drawing. However the details evolved, his interest in creating balance and tension out of nothingness, in converting his own passing emotions into colors and brushstrokes, never wavered. 'In a sense, I've been painting the same painting since I started,' he suggested in the 2009 documentary short 'Portrait of an American Artist,' directed by Michael Feldman. 'It's like each painting is still sort of part of the painting before. It just seems somewhat impractical to work on the same actual canvas for an entire lifetime, and so you sort of move on — but each painting is kind of a segue into the next.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Overlooked No More, Walasse Ting, Who Bridged Cultures With Paint and Prose
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. Flickering among the major figures of postwar art — the Minimalist sculptor Dan Flavin, the avant-garde artist Pierre Alechinsky, the abstract painter Sam Francis and others — is the radiant shadow of Walasse Ting. Ting, a painter and poet from China, introduced Flavin to Japanese ink. He turned Alechinsky on to acrylic paint. Together, he and Francis explored the interplay between Western action painting and Asian brush techniques.
Metropolis Japan
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Metropolis Japan
Pace Tokyo Presents: Tara Donovan
Pace is pleased to present a focused survey of Tara Donovan's work from the last 20 years at its Tokyo gallery. On view from May 17 to June 28, this presentation—marking the American artist's first solo exhibition in Tokyo—will bring together sculptures and installations she created between 2003 and 2024. Known for her process- and system-based work across multiple mediums and dimensions, Donovan began her career in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Drawing on the formal languages of the California Light and Space movement, Minimalism, and Postminimalism, she deftly manipulates and transforms everyday materials and objects—from buttons, plastic straws, Styrofoam cups, pencils, CD-ROM discs, and pins to readymade screens and Slinky toys—into shapeshifting sculptures, installations, drawings, and prints that explore the possibilities and limits of human perception. Her phenomenological works both use and misuse nontraditional materials, turning them into visually dazzling compositions without obliterating their fundamental essences or histories as objects from daily life. Event Details: Dates: May 17 – June 28 (Closed on Mondays) Venue: Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza A1 – 2nd floor, 5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku ￥Free
