The movement is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary post-minimal art practices, which extend or reflect on minimalism's original objectives.

[2] Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt and Frank Stella.

[3] Minimalism in music often features repetition and gradual variation, such as the works of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Julius Eastman and John Adams.

The term has also been used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.

[8] Examples of artists working in painting that are associated with Minimalism include Nassos Daphnis, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Ryman and others; those working in sculpture include Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, David Smith, Anthony Caro and more.

[12][13] Minimalism as a formal strategy has been deployed in the paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Yayoi Kusama, Giorgio Morandi, and others.

[14][15] Michael Fried called the minimalist artists literalists, and used literalism as a pejorative due to his position that the art should deliver transcendental experience[16] with metaphors, symbolism, and stylization.

The Donald Judd's pieces (see the photo on the right), on the other hand, are just objects sitting in the desert sun waiting for a visitor to discover them and accept them as art.

In Japan, for example, minimalist architecture began to gain traction in the 1980s when its cities experienced rapid expansion and booming population.

"[25] The chaotic environment was not only driven by urbanization, industrialization, and technology but also the Japanese experience of constantly having to demolish structures on account of the destruction wrought by World War II and the earthquakes, including the calamities it entails such as fire.

In addition, they "open a dialogue" with the surrounding environment to decide the most essential materials for the construction and create relationships between buildings and sites.

The basic geometric forms, elements without decoration, simple materials and the repetitions of structures represent a sense of order and essential quality.

[34] Minimalist architects humbly 'listen to figure,' seeking essence and simplicity by rediscovering the valuable qualities in simple and common materials.

[30] Simplicity is not only aesthetic value, it has a moral perception that looks into the nature of truth and reveals the inner qualities and essence of materials and objects.

[38] For example, the sand garden in Ryōan-ji temple demonstrates the concepts of simplicity and the essentiality from the considered setting of a few stones and a huge empty space.

In Vitra Conference Pavilion, Weil am Rhein, 1993, the concepts are to bring together the relationships between building, human movement, site and nature.

He believes that though reduced clutter and simplification of the interior to a point that gets beyond the idea of essential quality, there is a sense of clarity and richness of simplicity instead of emptiness.

John Pawson's interior design concepts for this project are to create simple, peaceful and orderly spatial arrangements.

While modern minimalism includes eye-catching forms, minimalist designs tend to emphasize geometric shapes and straight lines.

Readers are expected to take an active role in creating the story, to "choose sides" based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than react to directions from the writer.

[54][55][56][57][58] Some 1940s-era crime fiction of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted a stripped-down, matter-of-fact prose style to considerable effect; some[who?]

Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the metafiction trend of the 1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Robert Coover, and William H. Gass).

[59] Minimalist writers, or those who are identified with minimalism during certain periods of their writing careers, include the following: Raymond Carver,[60] Ann Beattie,[61] Bret Easton Ellis,[62][63] Charles Bukowski,[64][65] K. J. Stevens,[66] Amy Hempel,[67][68][69] Bobbie Ann Mason,[70][71][72] Tobias Wolff,[73][74][75] Grace Paley,[76][77] Sandra Cisneros,[78] Mary Robison,[79] Frederick Barthelme,[80] Richard Ford, Patrick Holland,[81] Cormac McCarthy,[82][83] David Leavitt and Alicia Erian.

[52] The term "minimalism" is also sometimes associated with the briefest of poetic genres, haiku, which originated in Japan, but has been domesticated in English literature by poets such as Nick Virgilio, Raymond Roseliep, and George Swede.

[85] Dimitris Lyacos's With the People from the Bridge, combining elliptical monologues with a pared-down prose narrative, is a contemporary example of minimalist playwrighting.

[86][87] In his novel The Easy Chain, Evan Dara includes a 60-page section written in the style of musical minimalism, in particular inspired by composer Steve Reich.

Intending to represent the psychological state (agitation) of the novel's main character, the section's successive lines of text are built on repetitive and developing phrases.

[88][89] More precisely, it was in a 1968 review in The Spectator that Nyman first used[90] the term, to describe a ten-minute piano composition by the Danish composer Henning Christiansen, along with several other unnamed pieces played by Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

[93][94] In film, minimalism usually is associated with filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Chantal Akerman, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Yasujirō Ozu.

[105] Color field pioneer artist Barnett Newman said he was "creating images whose reality is self-evident", an ethos that Hawkins is said to have applied to the problem of climate change and leading one commentator to remark that the graphics are "fit for the Museum of Modern Art or the Getty.