Mathias Goeritz

Using gilded metal, Mathias Goeritz endows cryptic Minimalist geometric shapes with spiritual meaning in works like Mensaje forging geometry to a signification.

By imbuing modern monochrome painting with the spirituality usually ascribed to gold in so many religions, Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990) prophesied the "forcing to mean, to say" pointed out decades later by James Meyer, thus endowing with cultural density the reality of specific objects later intuited by Donald Judd (1928-94), who observed in 1965 the dissemination of boundaries between painting and sculpture; a position that allowed Goeritz to generate a visionary "proto-post-minimalism", even predicting Eva Hesse.