5 Minimal Artists To Watch in 2025

In a contemporary art landscape often defined by complexity, maximalism, and digital saturation, minimalism continues to offer a counterpoint rooted in clarity, restraint, and precision. Far from being a static or nostalgic movement, minimal art today is undergoing a quiet but significant evolution. Emerging artists are reinterpreting its core principles—such as reduction, repetition, and spatial awareness—through new materials, conceptual frameworks, and sensibilities attuned to our present moment. This article highlights five promising artists who are redefining minimalism for a new generation. Their practices vary in medium and approach, yet they share a commitment to form, subtlety, and the power of less.

Bosco Sodi

Bosco Sodi (born 1970, Mexico City, based between New York and Oaxaca) builds his art from earth-like substances, turning sawdust, wood pulp, natural fibres, glue, and raw pigment into thick monochrome “landscapes.” He piles and pushes the mixture across large canvases, then lets gravity, drying time, and chance crack the surface. The fractures, colours, and craters that emerge are not planned; they are records of what the artist calls “controlled chaos,” where material and natural process complete the work as much as his own hand. Sodi sees these expanses of red, blue, black, or ochre as wordless relics—a direct conversation between body and matter that resists explanation. Leaving most pieces untitled, he invites viewers to meet the painting on its own terms, without narrative cues, much as one might read the textures of rock or soil. Explaining the appeal of his elemental approach, Sodi notes: “Words become hollow and obsolete. The intention of my work is to be observed and experienced.”

Sodi extends his belief in material exchange to community projects. In 2014, he founded Fundación Casa Wabi on the Oaxacan coast—an arts centre designed by architect Tadao Ando that pairs international artist residencies with creative programmes for surrounding villages. Sodi’s recent solo shows include presentations at He Art Museum, Foshan (2024); Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge MA (2023); Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, Venice (2022); Dallas Museum of Art (2021); and Asia Society, Hong Kong (2020). His work is held by institutions such as the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Phillips Collection, Washington DC; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.¹

Kim Bartelt

Kim Bartelt (born in Berlin) makes art by replacing brushstrokes with sheets of paper. Bartelt’s paper works are spare yet quietly vibrant, reflecting the slow, deliberate act of layering and fixing each piece. Subtle quirks—tiny creases, gentle folds, occasional raw edges—recall the papers’ earlier uses, while their delicate strata become apparent only when viewed closely. Rather than brushing pigment onto a surface, she composes with surface itself, letting sheets of paper stand in for paint. In doing so, she treats painting as an object shaped by elements already determined—the paper scraps she chooses are remnants, residues beyond her control. Over the last decade, Bartelt has carried this language from wall pieces into free-standing forms. Packing paper, papier-mâché, and lightweight wooden armatures allowed her to fold, prop, and suspend planes in space, transforming sculpture into a play between solidity and air.

Whether flat or three-dimensional, the compositions linger on opposites: presence and absence, structure and fragility, the permanent and the fleeting. She describes the process as “painting with surfaces,” allowing the paper’s inherited marks to guide each work rather than concealing them. Bartelt exhibits internationally. Recent solo shows include Cadogan Gallery, London (2024); Cadogan Gallery, Milan (2023); and Cadogan Gallery, London (2022). Group presentations span Circle Culture, Berlin; Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin; and venues in Mexico City, Ghent, and London. Residencies at Numeroventi, Florence, and Joya AiR, Spain (both 2019) deepened her investigation of space and material.²

Jerónimo Rüedi

Jerónimo Rüedi (b. 1981, Mendoza, Argentina) resides and works in Mexico City, where he has been based since 2015, following periods in Barcelona and Berlin. A graduate of Escola Massana, his practice revolves around painting but extends into stage design, publishing, and collaborative projects such as Aeromoto, the city’s public library for contemporary art and culture. Rüedi builds each canvas through dozens of translucent air-brushed layers made with primers and pigments he formulates himself. Broad mists of colour sit beside delicate, almost calligraphic marks that hover between abstraction, figuration, and unreadable script. These overlapping veils create a sense of elements caught in suspension while hinting at codes whose meaning remains just out of reach. Guided by meditation and ideas of impermanence, the artist treats every work as an apparition “trying to catch smoke,” a moment when perception arises before language fixes it.

Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Galerie Nordenhake, Mexico City (2024, 2022) and Stockholm (2023). His paintings have also appeared in institutional shows at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (2023), Museo Tamayo’s XVIII Painting Biennial (2019), and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (2019). Residencies include Casa Wabi (2023) and Museo Experimental El Eco (2016). Forthcoming museum projects are scheduled for Museo Experimental El Eco (2025) and a major solo exhibition at the Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes (2026). Parallel to the studio, Rüedi publishes artist books that explore the interplay of image and text, among them The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of (2017), Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously (2020), and a new title with Zolo Press (2024). Whether on paper or canvas, his work invites viewers to inhabit a space where systems of signs loosen, ambiguity persists, and meaning stays in perpetual motion.³

Maya Makino

Maya Makino (b. 1980, Kanagawa, Japan) is a painter whose entire practice revolves around a single material conversation: indigo dye absorbed into wood panels that have been prepared with gofun, the traditional shell-lime gesso. Living and working near Tokyo, she relies on the subtle translucency and capillary pull of the dye to build depths of blue that feel less applied than revealed, as if the colour has surfaced from the grain itself. Makino treats painting as a way to hold fleeting perceptions—night air, distant rain, the fragrance of a flower—before they crystallise into words. Each work begins with an involuntary flash of memory that she quickly sketches, then re-creates through successive soakings of the panel. Indigo seeps beyond the top layer, registering every fibre, crease, and relief she has coaxed into the ground. Because the pigment is plant-based and unpredictable, no two works share exactly the same hue; Makino describes this as “finding unexpected colour inside the colour.”

Anchoring the process is her fascination with ma, the Japanese idea of an interval or charged emptiness. The unpainted spaces and gradations between dark and light invite viewers to linger inside a temporal pause—the instant when recollection meets the present. By limiting herself to indigo, a dye embedded in Japan’s climate and everyday history, Makino also reconnects with her own cultural roots while discovering a freedom in chromatic restraint. Recent highlights include her U.S. debut in Making Their Mark: 7 Women in Abstraction at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, Connecticut (2023). Earlier presentations in Japan span galleries and non-profit spaces across Tokyo, Kyoto, and Kanagawa. Maya Makino joined the CAI Gallery program in 2022.⁴

Please find available works by Maya Makino here.

Liam Stevens

Liam Stevens (b. 1985, United Kingdom; resides and works between London and Tokyo) is a British artist whose paintings and reliefs emerge from a process of repetition. He stains raw canvas with as many as thirty translucent pigment washes, then draws measured pencil lines or builds shallow wooden structures on the surface. Every mark is identical in size, yet the stacking, clustering, and spacing of these elements set up subtle rhythms in the surrounding emptiness. The resulting fields of “perfect imperfection,” as he calls them, invite the eye to drift and settle, to notice patterns that feel at once orderly and uncertain. Memory of place anchors this search for balance. Stevens was raised amid the quiet repetitions of rural Somerset—hedgerows, horizons, rows of crops—before relocating to the hyper-layered centre of London, where he now looks out over dozens of skyscrapers from a seventh-floor flat. Both landscapes rely on recurring forms to create order; his work fuses the two, translating the pulse of city grids and country fields into contemplative sequences of line and tone.

The artist’s slow, meditative process leaves traces on every piece: darker seams where pigment pooled, lighter passages where the brush skimmed quickly, tiny variations in pencil pressure that break the mechanical spell of the grid. These nuances, he suggests, mirror the way we use repetition in daily life—comforting, familiar, yet never exactly the same. Stevens’s canvases and constructed panels have appeared in solo and group exhibitions at Fotokino, Marseille; Gallery Jason Shin, Seoul; Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona; and in a touring project with Booklet, Tokyo. Wherever they are displayed, the works offer viewers a chance to pause and feel the quiet tempo hidden within everyday patterns.⁵

1. Kasmin, Bosco Sodi consulted June 25, 2025. Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Bosco Sodi consulted June 25, 2025. KÖNIG GALERIE, Bosco Sodi consulted June 25, 2025. ↩︎
2. Cadogan Gallery, Kim Bartelt consulted June 26, 2025. Richeldis Fine Art, Kim Bartelt consulted June 26, 2025. Arden + White Gallery, Kim Bartelt consulted June 26, 2025. ↩︎
3. Galerie Nordenhake, Jerónimo Rüedi consulted June 26, 2025. Jerónimo Rüedi, About consulted June 26, 2025. émergent magazine, Jerónimo Rüedi at Galerie Nordenhake consulted June 26, 2025. ↩︎
4. CAI, Maya Makino consulted June 26, 2025. Aesence, In Conversation with Maya Makino consulted June 26, 2025. ↩︎
5. Francis Gallery, Liam Stevens consulted June 26, 2025. Alzueta Gallery, Liam Stevens consulted June 26, 2025. ↩︎

Cover image: Installation view of “ROOMS” (2025) at Arden + White Gallery, New Canaan, US.

Last Updated on July 14, 2025