Josef Albers, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Allan McCollum, Robert Morris, Richard Nonas, Keith Sonnier: From Line to Matter
Mitterrand is pleased to present a new group exhibition entitled From Line to Matter, from September 12th to December 20th, 2025, in both its Paris galleries.
Bringing together major figures of American Minimal and Post-Minimal art, the exhibition offers a cross-disciplinary view on a generation of artists who transformed sculptural and pictorial practices starting in the 1960s. Through a selection of distinctive works, it explores the fundamental principles of these artistic movements: formal reduction, raw materiality, repetition, the relationship to the body and space, and the physical experience of the artwork.
Carl Andre's horizontal structures, Fred Sandback's taut lines, Richard Nonas' repetitive modules and Robert Morris' suspended volumes activate a new relationship between the work, the space and the viewer, based on direct, sensory and physical experience rather than representation. Judd, major theorist of Minimalism, developed a series of geometric modules made of metal or Plexiglas, which he described as ‘specific objects’: neither paintings nor sculptures, but autonomous entities interacting with space.
Although predating Minimalism, Josef Albers’ squares foreshadow some of its key concerns through their formal rigor and serial approach, paving the way for an analytical exploration of perception. Keith Sonnier, by introducing neon and industrial materials into space, illustrates a post-Minimalist sensibility in which light, color and the environment become an integral part of the work. In turn, Allan McCollum develops large-scale serial and modular compositions in which repetition does not cancel out singularity, but on the contrary questions it. His systematic approach places his work in a post-minimal context that goes beyond pure formal reduction and questions the very conditions of uniqueness and reproducibility in art.
These approaches reinforce the idea that Minimalism - and its post-Minimal extension - is not a form of reduction, but rather one of essential density. Simplicity here becomes a strategy of revelation, of the line, of matter, and of our own perception. Through the works of Josef Albers, Carl Andre, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Allan Mccollum, Robert Morris, Richard Nonas, Fred Sandback and Keith Sonnier, From Line to Matter offers a collective view of an aesthetic that privileges form, material and space, without recourse to ornament or narrative.
