MINUS SPACE is a curatorial project located in Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...

, NY. It has gallery

Contemporary art gallery

A contemporary art gallery is a place where contemporary art is shown for exhibition and/or for sale. The term "art gallery" is commonly used to mean art museum , the rooms displaying art in any museum, or in the original sense, of any large or long room.-Identity, function and locality:A...

 and web site devoted to reductive art

Reductive art

Reductive art is a term to describe an artistic style or an aesthetic, rather than an art movement. Movements and other terms associated with reductive art include Minimal art, ABC art, anti-illusionism, cool art, rejective art , Bauhaus aesthetic, work that emphasizes clarity, simplification,...

.

History

MINUS SPACE began as an online curatorial

Curator

A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...

 and critical project presenting reductive and concept based art

Conceptual art

Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...

. Reductive art includes geometric abstraction, artwork that deals with repetition, monochrome

Monochrome painting

Monochromatic painting has been an important component of avant-garde visual art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Painters have created the exploration of one color, the examination of values changing across a surface, the expressivity of texture and nuance, expressing a wide...

 or limited color, seriality

Serial art

Serial art is an art movement in which uniform elements or objects were assembled in accordance with strict modular principles. The composition of serial art is a systematic process....

. and minimalism

Minimalism

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...

. It is also characterized by the use of plain-spoken materials, precise craftsmanship and intellectual rigor.

It was launched as a nonprofit, online curatorial project in August 2003 by Brooklyn artists

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 Matthew Deleget and Rosanna Martinez, and gradually developed into a showcase for dozens of artists. They began by putting portfolios and curating exhibitions online. MINUS SPACE published interviews of artists, reviews and critical essays. At this point project was only online, literally minus space.

MINUS SPACE then started to produce physical exhibitions in their Brooklyn project space. These included one person shows of abstract painting, installations

Installation art

Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...

 and performance art

Performance art

In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...

. In addition they began to curate exhibitions nationally and internationally at universities

University

A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...

, galleries, artist-run spaces

Artist-run space

An artist-run space is a gallery space run by artists, thus circumventing the structures of public and private galleries.Artist-run spaces have become realised as an important factor in urban regeneration...

 and nonprofit spaces located in Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

; St. Mary's City, Maryland

St. Mary's City, Maryland

St. Mary's City, in St. Mary's County, Maryland, is a small unincorporated community near the southernmost end of the state on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. It is located on the eastern shore of the St. Mary's River, a tributary of the Potomac. St. Mary's City is the fourth oldest...

; Sydney, Australia

Sydney

Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...

;; Houston, Texas

Houston, Texas

Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States, and the largest city in the state of Texas. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the city had a population of 2.1 million people within an area of . Houston is the seat of Harris County and the economic center of , which is the ...

; Brussels, Belgium

Brussels

Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...

.

Exhibitions and Curatorial Projects

In 2008, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center exhibited MINUS SPACE, a survey of 54 artists from 14 countries affiliated with MINUS SPACE. The exhibition was curated by Phong Bui

Phong Bui

Phong Bui is an artist, writer, and independent curator. Phong is a graduate from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pa. He continued his post graduate studies at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture and studied independently with Nicolas Carone...

, publisher of the Brooklyn Rail and P.S.1. Curatorial Advisor. The exhibition marked the 5th anniversary of MINUS SPACE.

Also in 2008 MINUS SPACE curated an exhibit to re-present abstract shaped canvas

Shaped canvas

Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...

 paintings as new, made by Mark Dagley  first shown with Tony Shafrazi

Tony Shafrazi

Tony Shafrazi is the owner of the Shafrazi Art Gallery in New York, who deals artwork by artists such as Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, and David LaChapelle....

 Gallery 20 years earlier in 1987. Most of the exhibition of was painted in William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

 Bunker in the Bowery

Bowery

Bowery may refer to:Streets:* The Bowery, a thoroughfare in Manhattan, New York City* Bowery Street is a street on Coney Island in Brooklyn, N.Y.In popular culture:* Bowery Amphitheatre, a building on the Bowery in New York City...

 in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

.

They curated a traveling exhibition Machine Learning

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

which was shown at the Boyden Gallery of St. Mary's College of Maryland

St. Mary's College of Maryland

St. Mary's College of Maryland, established in 1840, is a public, secular liberal arts college located in St. Mary's City, Maryland. It is a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges and designated as a Public Honors College . St. Mary's College is a small college, with about 2,000...

, The Painting Center in New York City, Gallery Sonja Roesch in Houston, TX in 2007 and 2008. The title of the exhibition was inspired by a subfield of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to learn. Machine learning algorithms recognize patterns within massive sets of data. Real world applications include the internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 search engine

Web search engine

A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...

. This exhibition examined new pattern painting in the information age.

Presence Online

MINUS SPACE has a space on the internet enabling it to collaborate with other institutions. The web site has an online log that functions as a web portal

Web portal

A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....

 for information on exhibitions of reductive art internationally. There is also a comprehensive directory

Web directory

A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links....

 of related web sites for reductive art including galleries, museums and related publications, a directory of artists affiliated with MINUS SPACE, and also artist interviews.

MINUS SPACE maintains a comprehensive Chronology

Chronology

Chronology is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time, such as the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".Chronology is part of periodization...

 of reductive and concept-based art. The chronology includes major events, exhibitions, and writings in the development of reductive and concept-based art in Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

, South

South America

South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...

 and North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

from 1800 to date.