Every student from architecture school knows ‘less is more’, but only few know what it really means. I wasn’t one of them. Although I could appreciate Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion, I had hard time to appreciate something that seems to be an empty canvas.
The Dia Beacon museum is an impressive renovation of an old paper factory. Landscape was designed by Robert Irwin, a minimalism artist who also designed landscape for Getty center. Inside is massive space filled with huge super simple art pieces. Everything was fine before I saw a huge painting that occupied the whole wall (later on I learned it was a work of Agnes Martin). To be honest, it took me couple minutes to convince myself that there was REALLY NOTHING on the canvas except white paint. No other colors and no forms. NOTHING! Other pieces did not give me less surprise than this one: huge holes of different forms on the ground by Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria's Equal Series, Richard Serrra’s cor-ten steel wall. All of these works were so different with what I had been taught and saw before. Actually, I felt those works very disturb, boring and non-inspiring. I was kind of confused during the visiting, but I had to admit that those works are really impressive and gave me much stronger visual impact than any of the art pieces I had ever seen before.
The Dia Beacon museum is an impressive renovation of an old paper factory. Landscape was designed by Robert Irwin, a minimalism artist who also designed landscape for Getty center. Inside is massive space filled with huge super simple art pieces. Everything was fine before I saw a huge painting that occupied the whole wall (later on I learned it was a work of Agnes Martin). To be honest, it took me couple minutes to convince myself that there was REALLY NOTHING on the canvas except white paint. No other colors and no forms. NOTHING! Other pieces did not give me less surprise than this one: huge holes of different forms on the ground by Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria's Equal Series, Richard Serrra’s cor-ten steel wall. All of these works were so different with what I had been taught and saw before. Actually, I felt those works very disturb, boring and non-inspiring. I was kind of confused during the visiting, but I had to admit that those works are really impressive and gave me much stronger visual impact than any of the art pieces I had ever seen before.
Agnes Martin
Michael Heizer's North East South West
Richard Serra's Ellipses 
Walter De Maria's Equal SeriesTo be frankly, I did not like those pieces at that point, but I strongly realized the power of simplicity.
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