Minimal Art is a diverse movement in painting and sculpture that began primarily in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. In painting, the movement was usually characterized chiefly by the minimal presence of such standard "artistic" means as form and color – in the all-black paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, for example – and by the use of components that in themselves have no emotive or aesthetic significance. Hard-edge painting and pop art shared with the minimalists the repudiation of the expressive, emotional functions of earlier modern art, and broke with traditional notions of art as work of a unique and complex nature.

In sculpture, the minimalist movement has continued into the 1990s. A minimal sculpture is often constructed by others, from the artist's plans, in commonplace industrial materials such as plastic or concrete. Such works are not intended to embody any representational or emotional qualities but must be seem simply as what they are. Alexander Calder, who might be thought of as an early minimalist, used organic forms for his structures, but later sculptors such as Carl Andre, Anthony Caro, Dan Flavin, and Tony Smith have concentrated on architectonic shapes – cubes, spheres, and beams. Others, such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, employed manufactured objects—a row of identical boxes or bricks, for example – arranged simply to emphasize their concrete physical presence.