Taint

Taint observes the continued currency of the minimalist project through the disparate approaches of six contemporary Australian artists. The artists explore what could loosely be termed a post-minimalist tendency. Their works borrow from the now historical principles of minimalism, but interrupt and compromise the austere surfaces associated with the movement, subverting what was once a puritanical exercise in form, space, colour and composition. These artists infuse works with pollutants; humour, domestic reference or emotive content and yet the strength of the works’ aesthetic presence could be said to be indebted to their Minimalist forebears. By enlivening and extending the post-minimalism debate, these works force the principles of the movement into a conversation with the present day, and therefore into the amorphous terrain of the postmodern. The exhibition seeks to question the affect of revisiting the formal aesthetics of this period, of mimicry, re-enactment and a continued interest in reduction to essential form, to the audience and to their relation to the work.