Like any of the significant Modernist languages Minimalism is not only still part of the construction of contemporary art, it has evolved to fit new situations and respond to new discourses. The impulse to convey elemental or essential perceptions, delineate the presentness of an object and redress the relationship of the audience to artworks remain pertinent subjects. The questions of autonomy, referentiality, authorship, and seriality which are now integrated into our experience of all artworks were first foregrounded in a process of creative inquiry which has been called everything from ABC art to Primary Structures. Minimalism was a pivotal movement which challenged the cult of connoisseurship and the power of the critic and ushered in a more cerebral kind of artmaking that couldn't be reconciled with the auratic or the sublime. One needs only to consider the conceptual breadth of Sol LeWit, the formal eccentricity of Robert Morris and the material complexity of early Eva Hesse, to recall how variously minimalists worked to bring modern art back down to earth, to construct a literal presence facilitated by a radical fusion of idea and form.

The work of Birgitta Weimer, Thomas Skomski, Raye Bemis, Ulli Rooney, Frank Badur, Jens Hanke and Mario Reis is reflexive of the legacy of minimalism. It is difficult to apprehend the subjects of these artists without a connection to the language of austere, emphatic gestures that have evolved from that tradition. To that they add the particularities of time and place, dismantling the conceit of ahistoricism in late modern art. Individual experience and the rhetoric of materials are placed into a dialogic framework where the viewer is prompted to participate in and take pleasure in the production of meaning.

-Paul Krainak