A new exhibition in France explores how reduction can reshape our contemporary art experience

Throughout history, art has often sought fulfilment: the complete representation of reality, the richness of colour, mark-making, and detail. Yet, at a certain point, this tension was reversed, and the idea that “less is more” began to take hold, showing that subtraction can reveal more than addition. A key influence in this shift was Japanese prints, as attested by architect Frank Lloyd Wright:

I have never confided to you how much Japanese prints have inspired me. I have never forgotten that first experience and never will; at least I hope so. For me, it was the great gospel of simplification, the elimination of the superfluous [...]. A Japanese artist captures form by seeking the underlying geometry ... He knows, for example, the form in the pine tree (as in every natural object on earth), the geometry that underlies the form and constitutes the particular character of that tree as a pine tree - what Plato called the eternal idea. For him, the invisible is visible ...

Fascinated by the lessons of Japanese woodblock prints, Wright brought to architecture a principle of essentiality, aiming to capture through simplification - and the “elimination of the superfluous” - the deep structure of reality beyond surface appearances. This paradigm shift would influence multiple disciplines: from music, where John Cage demonstrated that “even silence is pregnant with sound” (as in his famous 4’33”, during which the pianist does not play a single note), to fashion and contemporary design, where the intimate essentiality of Calvin Klein or the decluttering principles of Marie Kondo translate the same pursuit of simplicity into clothing and everyday gestures, ultimately arriving at visual art.

It is precisely this genealogy of the essential that the new exhibition Minimal at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris seeks to explore, retracing the birth and evolution of Minimalism in the visual arts since the 1960s. During this period, a form of art emerged that, through a rigorous economy of materials and signs and a total renunciation of imitation, symbolism, and narrative, achieved a purified and, in consequence, universal language - one that echoes across all cultures, as evidenced by the significant presence of Japanese artists in the exhibition.

The exhibition begins inside the austere reinforced concrete cylinder sculpted by Tadao Ando at the hearth of the Bourse et Commerce. Within this monumental yet meditative space stand five sculptures by artist Meg Webster, where minimalism meets ecology and sensoriality. Geometric and organic forms composed of clay, earth, beeswax, and tree branches invite not only aesthetic contemplation but also a renewed sensory awarenessm through visual, olfactory, and auditory enjoyment. Through the manipulation of seemingly simple materials, Webster encourages the viewer to relate to art in a new way: how often, after all, have we wondered about the smell or sound of a work of art?

Figure 1View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025.

Figure 2 View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.

Figure 3 Vue de l’exposition « Minimal », Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. Photo : Florent Michel / 11h45 / Pinault Collection.

After passing through the Rotunda, visitors ascend to the upper floors, where the exhibition unfolds through seven sections: Light, Mono-ha, Balance, Surface, Grid, Monochrome, and Materialism. Each of these thematic areas explores how abstraction, geometry, and economy of means - all paradigmatic tools of the minimalist vocabulary - are expressed in plural and heterogeneous ways. This is evident, for example, in the work of the Mono-ha artists, a movement that emerged in Japan in the 1960s and holds a prominent role in the Pinault collections. A central aspect of the Mono-ha artists’ investigation lies in challenging the traditional relationship between the viewer and the works placed on pedestals or separate supports. Mono-ha artists favour indeed positioning materials directly in the exhibition space, thereby reducing the distance between the object and the observer. In doing so, artists such as Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga and Susumu Koshimizu reject the presumed objectivity of industrial objects, favouring resonant combinations of pre-existing materials that enhance their intrinsic qualities and engage both the space and the viewer as active components of the work. This approach is exemplified in From Surface to Surface – a tetrahedron, in which the Japanese artist Susumu Koshimizu explores how a mass can preserve its identity through progressive morphological variations. Each of the four bronze tetrahedra is identical in size and weight but is arranged in such a way as to generate different surfaces and visual configurations; the chosen material, bronze, enriches the dialectic between form and material through its tactile and visual qualities. In this way, geometry becomes a tool for neutralising objective expression, allowing materials to assert autonomously their presence in space.

Figure 4 View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.

Figure 5 View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.

In the section dedicated to Materialism, artists from the 1960s and 1970s explore the expressive potential of primitive materials - earth, wood, water, wax, fibre - organising them into geometric or serialised forms that enhance their intrinsic qualities. Through folding, binding, stacking, or weaving, these materials evoke traditional craft practices, while simultaneously managing to detach themselves from their original natural condition. This approach is visible in Phase of Nothingness-Water by Japanese artist Nobuo Sekine (1969), where two containers - one cylindrical, the other parallelepiped - contain the same amount of water, , filled to the brim to create an impression of monolithic solidity. Nevertheless, the reflective surface captures the image of the viewer and the surrounding space, underscoring the idea that every form is merely a transient phase within a continuously changing reality.

Figure 6 View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.

Continuing through the exhibition, the observer can engage with the theme of the grid, a central device in minimalist practice from the 1960s onwards. Serial, anti-naturalistic, and allusive to the industrialisation of our society, grids in Minimalism are often created through drawn lines, but also through the arrangement of objets trouvés. Building on the legacies of Cubism, Constructivism, and De Stijl, artists also intervened on the rigidity often associated with grids by deforming or “softening” them, bearing witness to the emergence of an unstable society riddled with shifting tensions. In No Title (1967), Eva Hesse exemplifies this approach by arranging steel washers on a wooden support and contrasting their industrial uniformity with minimal yet variable irregularities, introducing a human and almost tactile sensibility into Minimalism.

The final rooms explore further focal points of minimalist practice. Particularly significant is the theme of equilibrium: the tension between mass, gravity, and human presence becomes an active experience in which balance functions not only as a visual metaphor, but as a condition physically sensed by the viewer. This is evident in Richard Serra’s Right Angle Prop, where two lead sheets support one another without illusion or ornament, presenting balance as a literal, felt state. The following hall turns instead to surface, presenting it as a field in which the boundaries between painting and sculpture are deliberately blurred. Minimalist and reductive artists of the 1960s and ’70s frequently employed industrial processes or unconventional supports to dismantle hierarchical distinctions between media, granting colour the status of an object and imbuing objects with the immediacy of painting. Dorothea Rockburne’s Tropical Tan exemplifies this strategy: pig-iron panels, creased and sprayed with a commercial paint tone, become a study in how surface responds to pressure, tension, and light. The final space investigates light as both medium and environment, reflecting a moment when artists embraced luminosity not merely as illumination, but as a sculptural substance capable of shaping perception. Minimalist practitioners such as Dan Flavin, Mary Corse, and their contemporaries recognised that electric light - whether neon, fluorescent, projected, or natural -could dissolve the boundaries between artwork, architecture, and the viewer’s movement through space.

Figure 7 View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.

In conclusion, Minimalism reshaped the relationship between art, matter, and observation, renouncing narrative and concentrating on the most essential conditions of artistic creation: balance, surface, light, weight, colour, and space. In doing so, it invites viewers to become not passive spectators but active participants in the unfolding of each work. By stripping away excess, Minimalism reveals how perception itself becomes a creative act, one in which meaning emerges through attention, presence, and embodied experience. It reminds us that even the simplest forms can open onto complex reflections - on how we inhabit space, how we encounter objects, and how the world around us is continually shaped by the way we look, move, and feel.

Figure 8 View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.