Carel Nicolaas Visser

  

Carel Nicolaas Visser ( 1928 - 2015) was a Dutch sculptor. He is considered an important representative of Dutch abstract-minimalist constructivism in sculpture.From 1948 until 1949 Visser studied architecture at the Technical University in Delft and subsequently from 1949 until 1951 sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague. After study in England and France, he settled as an independent artist in 1952 in Amsterdam.
Carel Visser is seen as one of the most important constructivist sculptors of the Netherlands. His later work is characterized by the assembly of a variety of materials, such as tires, oil drums, car windows, leather, sheepskin, eggs and so on. He made organized connections, a kind of assemblages, with this so-called great and sometimes small objets trouvés (found objects). Some of his work has been compared to a musical composition in which repetition and variation play an important role.
Around 1960, Visser was focussed on massive closed cube of iron and "slack" cube wire. Visser, among other things, was inspired by nature (plants and animals) which also explains his use of natural materials such as wood, wool, sand, feathers, bones, rope and leather.His works from the period 1975-1985 could be called environments, as opposed to the more sculptural work as the dying horse (about 1949).Wikipedia

 

Ronald Bladen - Minimalism

 

 Ronald Bladen (1918- 1988) was an American painter and sculptor. He is particularly known for his large-scale sculptures. His artistic stance, was influenced by European Constructivism, American Hard-Edge Painting, and sculptors such as Isamu Noguchi and David Smith. Bladen in turn had stimulating effect on a circle of younger artists including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and others, who repeatedly referred to him as one of the ‘father figures’ of Minimal Art.
Bladen began his artistic career as a painter in San Francisco, where he had moved in 1939 from his native Canada, and participated in the active community of poets and other artists there. He moved to New York in 1956. In the early 1960s he experimented with collage and relief sculptures. By 1965 Bladen’s work expanded dimensionally when he began making room-size sculptures of simplified geometric shapes. These wood constructions had smooth, painted exteriors that masked complexly engineered scaffolding hidden within the forms. Bladen’s earliest sculptures of this type were multicolored; Untitled (Three Elements) inaugurated a series of starker, mature works. It was included in Primary Structures, a landmark exhibition of minimalist art at The Jewish Museum in New York, where it was first shown publicly in 1966.

Jiro Takamatsu - Japanese Contemporary Art

 

 Jiro Takamatsu (1936 –1998) became one of the most influential and important artists making art in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s. Working in the fertile ground between Dada, Surrealism, and Minimalism for almost four decades, Takamatsu used photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, and performance to create fundamental investigations into the philosophical and material origins of art.
Born in 1936 in Tokyo, Takamatsu formed the collective Hi Red Center in 1963 with Genpei Akasegawa and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, participating in actions carried out in Tokyo that sought to eliminate the boundary between art and life. In 1964, he began making his signature Shadow Paintings (which he continued until the end of his life), a critical inquiry into the formal genesis of painting. In 1972–73, he created the seminal series Photograph of Photograph, which raised questions regarding issues of appropriation and memory. Between 1968 and 1972, he taught at Tama Art University, Tokyo, and was a key figure in the development of the Mono-ha movement. Wikipedia 

 

Jene Highstein - Minimalism

 

 Jene Highstein ( 1942 -2013 )
"Jene Highstein is a sculptor who, like his peers and friends Richard Nonas, Bob Grosvenor, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others, emerged in the early 1970’s on a landscape in New York populated by powerful sculptors a few years older – Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin. Sharing many of their minimalist concerns, the new sculptors were however free men and women who were not wearied by the intellectual demands of the fight with Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and were filled with a newer sense of adventure in materials, process, and occasionally romantic relationships with landscape and architecture.
Highstein’s early work in New York depended on large and brutal manipulations of common building materials such as giant pipes, concrete, and plywood. Brought to location in Soho and Tribeca in big pick up trucks and maneuvered into place with old fashioned rope rigging, the placements were daring: such shows depended on close circles of friends and trusted allies.
These early 1970’s works acted as a bridge between pure process pieces such as Richard Serra’s late 1960’s work, and later, more formal sculptural works by Highstein in the 1980’s. While Highstein’s 1980’s work moves towards more clearly defined forms using fabricated materials, his earlier body of work combines abstract shapes with raw, industrial materials and pure or geometrically rigorous measurements to create minimalist, transitional, carefully sited formations. "(hclocktower.org)