Minimal — How a Radical Language Spread Across the World
- Anna Lilli Garai
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Location: Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris
Date: October 8, 2025 – January 19, 2026
Project: Major group exhibition
Why it Matters: Traces Minimalism’s worldwide evolution through over a hundred landmark works
The Bourse de Commerce opens the fall season with Minimal, a sweeping exhibition dedicated to Minimalist art and its global evolution. Bringing together more than one hundred works from the Pinault Collection, along with major loans from prestigious institutions, the show explores how a radical artistic language emerged and took different forms across continents from the 1960s onward.
Curated by Jessica Morgan, director of Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition moves beyond a single definition of Minimalism. Instead, it maps a conversation between artists who stripped art down to its core: material, space, and the viewer’s presence. Figures like Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, On Kawara, Robert Ryman, François Morellet, Lee Ufan, Lygia Pape, Rasheed Araeen, and Richard Serra appear side by side, showing how these ideas took root not only in the U.S. and Europe but also in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Organized around seven themes — Light, Mono-ha, Balance, Surface, Grid, Monochrome, and Materialism — the exhibition places movement and context at its center. It shows how artists used simple materials and clear forms to dissolve the distance between artwork and audience. In Japan, Mono-ha explored the interdependence of natural and industrial materials. In Brazil, Neo-Concretism created sensual, participatory encounters. In Europe and the U.S., artists pushed sculpture and painting into pure, spatial experiences.
Alongside major works from the Pinault Collection, dedicated spaces anchor the exhibition: Agnes Martin’s meditative paintings, On Kawara’s Date Paintings, Meg Webster’s site-specific landscape in the Rotonde, and interventions by Charlotte Posenenske that weave through the building. Together, these works reveal the different voices that shaped and expanded Minimalism as a living, global language.
