Avant-garde visual arts movement that emerged in the early 1960s, characterized best by three-dimensional objects in simple geometric shapes. Central figures included Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Robert Morris. These artists drew on early twentieth-century avant-garde art by Marcel Duchamp and Soviet artists to develop an art of serial repetition of units, made of common industrial materials, including plywood, steel, Plexiglass, fluorescent light tubes and bricks. These artworks were often fabricated in commercial workshops. This was in part a critical response to the dominance of abstract expressionist styles that emphasized the private experience of the artist, and the gesture of the artist’s hand. As against modernist critical dicta, which held that the field of art was the exploration of its specific media, minimalism implied that art was equivalent to other, industrial forms of labor. The minimalists were theoretically sophisticated and wrote about their work in art journals, and some were concerned that their work should draw attention to the architectural conditions of the experience of art.

By the 1970s, when minimalism was established as a style, in the hands of some artists it degenerated into corporate lobby decoration.