Reductive, a process not a style

Robert Irwin: "I went through a reductive process, which was misidentified as being minimalism. Minimalism had become destilled into a style that had about it a kind of finality in regards to the work not having content and essentially existing on its own. I started out with all the same presumptions as everyone else, all the same baggage. But I found there were just too many things in my paintings, things that did not contribute enough to justify their being there. So I made the simplest assumptions: everything in a painting either works for you, or by its mere presence it works against you. So I started editing my work, taking out what was really not crucial or critical to it."   (in Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries, p. 49.)