Minimalism Transformed at Oeno Gallery November 13 – 5, 2021 presents three very different contemporary minimalist artists. They all create beautiful, intelligent, and engaging objects.

Contemporary minimalism tells a story that seeks to engage its viewer, a welcome departure from its cold 1960’s predecessor. Closed, uncommunicative, anonymous forms created in a sleek industrial aesthetic were the hallmarks of modern minimalism. Donald Judd’s primary structures and Sol Lewitt’s modular cubes come to mind. In contrast, the minimalist aesthetics of Tim Forbes, Aron Hill, and Jana Osterman are open and communicative. Their work embraces personal stories, cultural context, and interactive performance, while still employing a pared down formal and material vocabulary. But, like the modern minimalists, these three artists covet high quality materials and impeccable execution.

Tim Forbes’ black and white paintings exude the minimalist vocabulary of essential form. They have a resolved presence and emanate formal tension. At the same time, they are ‘chatty,’ intellectually challenging, and wholly invested in the socio-cultural context of the time. Forbes’ diptychs and triptych’s have multiple configurations and offer to partner with the viewer in their creation. Like puzzle pieces that can arrive at different answers depending on the questions posed to them, these paintings invite conversation. So, while they appear essential in form they are covertly, deliberately, unresolved. The invitation to co-create that Forbes is advancing is fresh, engaging, and part of the deeply felt collaborative ethos of its creator.

Aron Hill’s minimalist aesthetic could also be understood as deconstructed formal abstraction or even contemporary cubism. Hill’s painting practice defies easy categorization because they deploy all the usual formal elements – a painterly line, a bold arc, intersecting colour relationships, mass, and volume. It’s the unusual combination of these elements that makes their work unique. Upon second glance, a ‘painterly line’ reveals its true stencil-like self and becomes a formal character in a dance for meaning amidst other formal characters Hill imagines. Their paintings are objects, but the formal elements are subjects through and through as they jostle for re-definition. Hill grew up with missionaries who would return from missions with relics despoiled from unsavable souls. Their early influence and questioning of religious practices are embedded in Hill’s formal painting practice. Hill observes, “when we separate things there is always the chance that the decontextualization will alter their understanding.” Their painting methodology interrogates practices of excision with formal vocabulary: what happens when formal elements are removed, rearranged, and made strange?

Jana Osterman creates luxurious, touchable biomorphic objects with an elusive quality. Her measured restraint is present in each sculpture. The essential forms flirt with anthropomorphism but resist and become their own unique, oddly beautiful objects. Osterman invites viewers to interact with her sculptures, to hold and caress them. A skilled fabricator and artist, each of Osterman’s sculptures are realized in high quality materials and elegantly finished. Of her catalpa wood sculptures Osterman explains, “this series of carved wood pieces was an exploration of textured biomorphic forms, using the wood growth lines as an addition to the rhythmic, shape shifting topography.”