The big thing about small things – Minimalist Brutalism

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Minimalist Brutalism a blog about how the simple things in life can be the most beautiful.

The name is inspired by the words of Robert Venturi, “Less is a bore”. Minimalism and brutalism are two design movements which started in 1950s and 1960s and became very popular in 1970s and 1980s.

The objects from this period often look very similar to each other: boxy shapes, straight lines, bright colors. But there are many subtle differences between them, which make them interesting for people who like minimalistic designs. Minimalism means that the object has just a few elements of decoration, usually plain colors (black/white/gray), geometric shapes (triangles, squares), and straight lines. Sometimes there are also small patterns.

All these objects were designed for mass production, so they were made with cheap materials: concrete, cement, plywood, plastic etc. In many cases you don’t need any skills to make such an object – it is a matter of cutting or gluing boards together to make a cube or rectangle.

That’s why these designs are also known as industrial design or machine design because they look like machines or technical equipment. Also they have no superfluous details so they are very modern but

The movement is called Minimalist Brutalism, not because it minimizes brutality but because it is brutal about minimizing. Minimalist Brutalism, also known as “Less but better” or “Less for more”, refers to a design philosophy that emerged in the early 1950s as a reaction against the prevailing taste for complex and ornate design. The basic idea behind this philosophy is that the absolute quality of a product is most important, not its quantity.

Minimalist Brutalist architecture was developed mainly in the 1960s and 70s by American and British architects such as Louis Kahn, Marcel Breuer, and Le Corbusier. The buildings designed by these architects share a common goal: they seek to expose the bare necessities of buildings, stripping them of any ornamentation and leaving only the most necessary structural elements standing.*

The more we understand about what makes the value of an object, the easier it is to understand why we may find that value.

Authenticity is a concept used in art to communicate what makes some objects more valuable than others. Simply put, authenticity refers to how closely a piece of art hews to the original concept or design of the artist who created it. The closer to the original concept, the more authentic it is deemed to be and the greater its potential monetary and/or artistic value.

Tina Barney is one of my favorite contemporary artists because she both has a clear sense of her own style and also creates art pieces that are both beautiful and insightful. She is known for creating works that have a simple elegance and minimalism but also communicate something very interesting about her subjects – which are usually women she knows personally or from photographs.

The word “minimalist” often brings to mind flat, boring, uninteresting paintings or sculpture. But minimalist art can actually be quite complex. Think of Donald Judd’s work for example (if you can afford it):

If you’re not familiar with Minimalist Brutalism, you should check out this blog which explains it better than I ever could: http://www.minimalistbrutalism.

The more you look at brutalist architecture the more you realise that it is actually a celebration of the small.

It’s through their simplicity, elegance and tactility that simple shapes such as cubes, cylinders and pyramids become icons of beauty.

They don’t take up much space, but they make a great impact. Here are some examples:

People often say that minimalism is a cold or empty style, but minimalism is actually full of things. It’s just that most of the things are hidden.

Minimalism is a style where you can see the bones of the structure, the bare minimum elements that make something work.

The term “minimalism” was coined by the critic Robert Hughes. He wrote about it in the mid-1960s, when he noticed that some European and American painters were working with a very simple style, often with just a few colors and plain backgrounds. He called them “The New Realists” because he thought they were trying to paint realistically what they saw. But they weren’t. They were painting objects as they would look if you stripped them down to their bare essentials.

Trying to replace reality with an idealized version of reality took centuries; you can see traces of it in ancient Greek statues and Renaissance paintings where people look like they’re wearing make-up or painted on clothing. But at some point in the 20th century people started stripping away more than just surface details; they started stripping away *everything* except what was absolutely necessary for an object to be itself. They wanted to create objects that were more honest than realistic paintings could ever be

Abstract Minimalism certainly has its roots in the work of Mondrian and Malevich in the 1920s, but it was not until the 1950s that artists first began to explore the aesthetic possibilities of the Minimalist philosophy.

The early experiments with form and color carried out by painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Mark Rothko would come to define the look of Minimalism, as they used their backgrounds in architecture to place clean rectangular canvases on unadorned walls or hang them from ceilings.

Towards the end of his career, Frank Stella challenged the ascetic nature of Minimalism with works such as

The term “Minimalism” was coined in English by the American critic Michael Fried in 1967; with regard to visual arts, it describes art produced from the early 1960s onward whose practitioners have been influenced by the earlier works of artists such as Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Donald Judd and others. Minimalist art is often “geometric,” “rigorous,” “simple” and “conceptual.” It is also often about scale in relation to the human body and notionally about how objects in the world appear from a subjective perspective.

The movement was especially motivated by a desire to explore the nature of art itself, often through reduction to elements such as mass, line and color. Minimalist sculpture is generally small—sometimes very small—and is often made of common, everyday materials such as stone, steel, glass and wood. Minimalist paintings and drawings are generally abstract, though some are representational.

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