Untitled (Cat #256) 1995

Phil Sims, born in 1940, made this untitled painting, one in a series, with pigment suspended in wax on canvas. Sims is part of a generation that questions what painting is and can be. In the latter half of the 20th century, many painters felt confined by the institutions of art and strove for something more. Sims is often associated with minimalism, an avant-garde movement that rejected representational art and focused on simple, geometric forms. The use of encaustic may have been a deliberate effort to flatten the picture plane in order to push the history of painting to its very limits. Art historians are vital in understanding the institutional pressures on artists, and in revealing the economic and cultural conditions that make such artistic choices possible.