In the 1960s and ’70s in New York, several discourses emerged in the field of art that remain influential today: minimalism, hard-edge, geometric abstraction, and conceptual art. They could be described as reflecting new ideas about abstract space and relations to form—on architectonic as much as philosophical levels. While certain figures have come to represent essentialist ideas of these movements, further inquiries lead in unexpected directions. This project examines the work of Jo Baer, Dorothea Rockburne, Lee Lozano, Anne Truitt, Robin Bruch, Laura Grisi, Deborah Remington, Tina Matkovic, and others. It seeks to reveal positions developed by these artists that might be considered digressive formalisms. Through active research, the aim is to examine and present work of some significant yet critically underrecognized American artists, and to propose alternative historic models to early formalist tendencies and their architectonic notions of form, color, and space.

Megan Francis Sullivan is an artist living in Berlin, Germany. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. From 2006 to 2007, she was a fine arts researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands, where she published the book Die Hunterklasse, together with the FN-Verlag, Warendorf. Her work often involves interdisciplinary collaboration interested in divergencies of representation. It has recently been shown at Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg (2013); Castillo/Corrales, Paris (2013); the Kunstmuseum, Bern (2014); and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2014). Since 2011, she has been a lecturer in the Sculpture Department at the School of Architecture, Brandenburgische Technische Universität, Cottbus.