David Zwirner is presenting a group exhibition at its London gallery, bringing together works by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Robert Ryman, and Fred Sandback—five artists who helped redefine abstraction during the 1960s and 1970s.
The exhibition explores how colour—and sometimes its deliberate absence—shaped the development of Minimalist and post-Minimalist art. Through sculpture, painting and works on paper, the presentation highlights the ways these artists reconfigured material, space and perception in pursuit of a radically reduced visual language.
A selection of works on the gallery’s ground floor focuses on the artists’ use of colour to define space and form. Among the highlights is Flavin’s three fluorescent tubes (1963), a rarely exhibited early work that marked the first time the artist used more than one lamp and introduced colour into his now iconic fluorescent light sculptures.
Also on view is a set of twenty woodcuts by Judd, in which colour variations unfold across a single compositional structure, emphasising the artist’s belief that “material, space and colour are the main aspects of visual art.” Two signature sculptural planks by McCracken, finished in high-gloss red and blue, reflect the artist’s interest in the transcendental possibilities of minimalist form.
Other notable works include a rare vertical yarn construction by Sandback, distinguished by its use of green—a colour he used sparingly in his work—and an early 1963 painting by Ryman. In Ryman’s painting, layered white brushstrokes partially conceal tones of green, red and taupe beneath, revealing the artist’s evolving exploration of painting as a physical structure rather than an illusionistic surface.
The exhibition continues on the gallery’s first floor with works defined by the absence of colour. Here, monochrome surfaces and restrained materials reveal how each artist approached formal experimentation differently, even while sharing a broader minimalist sensibility.
Together, the works demonstrate how these artists—highly influential to one another as well as to subsequent generations—developed a set of aesthetic strategies that continue to shape contemporary art today.
Flavin, Judd, McCracken, Ryman, Sandback, 25th March–22nd May, 2026, David Zwirner London
About the artists
From 1963 until his death, Dan Flavin (1933–1996) produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilised commercially available fluorescent lamps to create installations, or ‘situations’ as he preferred to call them, of light and colour. Through these light constructions, Flavin was able to establish and redefine space. The artist’s work – which ranges in scale from individual wall-mounted and corner constructions to large-scale works, in which he employed whole rooms or corridors – testifies to his recurrent preoccupation with architecture.
With the intention of creating straightforward work without recourse to grand philosophical statements,
Donald Judd (1928–1994) eschewed the classical ideals of representational sculpture to create a rigorous visual vocabulary that defines objects as its primary mode of articulation. The unaffected, direct quality of his work demonstrates Judd’s strong interest in colour, form, material, and space, thus establishing him as one of the most significant American artists of the postwar period.
John McCracken (1934–2011) occupies a singular position within the recent history of American art, as
his work melds the restrained formal qualities of minimalist sculpture with a distinctly West Coast
sensibility expressed through colour, form, and finish. While experimenting with increasingly
three-dimensional canvases in the early 1960s, the artist began to produce objects made with industrial
materials, including plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin, creating the highly reflective,
smooth surfaces for which he has become known.
Robert Ryman (1930–2019) is widely celebrated for his tactile works using white paint, in all its many
permutations, which he executed using a range of painterly media on various supports, including paper,
canvas, linen, aluminium, vinyl, and newsprint. Emerging in the 1960s, Ryman eschewed self-contained
representational and abstract imagery, instead giving precedence to the physical gesture of applying
paint. Unlike many of the artists and movements with which he is often associated, such as abstractexpressionism and minimalism (labels to which he never subscribed), Ryman neither reveled in the emotive qualities of gesturalism nor sought to eradicate the painterly mark; rather, his works are novel and sensitive explorations of the visual, material, and experiential qualities of his medium that exist in a dialogue with their surroundings.
Fred Sandback (1943–2003) is known for sculptures that outline planes and volumes in space. Though he employed metal wire and elastic cord early in his career, the artist soon dispensed with mass and weight by using acrylic yarn to create works that address their physical surroundings, the ‘pedestrian space’, as Sandback called it, of everyday life. By stretching lengths of yarn horizontally, vertically, or diagonally at different scales and in varied configurations, the artist developed a singular body of work that elaborated on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity.
