Beginning his career as an Abstract Expressionist, the American painter and sculptor Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) is today generally associated with Color Field painting, a movement that developed in the United States in the late 1940s, with the aim to evoke emotion and ideas purely through color itself rather than through identifiable, illustrative scenes and forms. Kenneth Noland experimented with line, form, color, scale and the shape of the canvas. He was one of the first to develop the use of shaped canvases, painting on increasingly asymmetrical canvases.

Focusing on the pictorial aspects of painting, the artist rejects any narrative, illusory, symbolic, or mundane elements in his paintings. By employing shaped canvases, his pictorial genre establishes the definitive renouncement of the notion of painting as a window, a screen, or a virtual space in the rectangular format. Kenneth Noland attended the Black Mountain College where he was introduced to the work of such first generation painters as Piet Mondrian and Vasily Kandinsky. At that time, Noland began to take an experimental and improvisatory approach to composition and color theory. Later, his sphere of influence included artists like his influence Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Helen Frankenthaler, David Smith and Morris Louis.

Roman Opałka does not paint time, he has been materialising it since 1965. The canvases covered tirelessly with arithmetic sequences in Les Détails are accompanied by a vocal recording of Opałka listing these sequences as well as his self-portrait photographed day after day, with the same framing, the same white shirt and the same expression. The numbers grow vertiginously on his increasingly white paintings, while time does its work on his voice and his parchment-like face.

The numbers 1 to 5,607,249, painted by Opałka over a period of more than 40 years, appear in a long series of paintings created between 1965 and 2011. It was in 1965, that this work became an inevitable part of his life. In order to explore the passing of time with no way back,  Opałka added an essential element to his succession of number: in the initially black background of the painting, he added a small percentage of white colour with every painting. As such, in his last works, Opałka paints with white on white. The painting gradually and irreversibly moved towards an apparent homogeneity that erases all spatial variations.

Opałka was represented at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 2003 as well as at the Documenta in Kassel in 1977. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others.

Considering himself as a painter, not an artist, Niele Toroni, born in Switzerland in 1937, is known today as one of the first European minimalist painters of the 1960s. Niele Toroni developed a practice called Travail-Peinture which consisted of marking a surface with imprints of a umber. 50 paintbrush at regular 30 cm intervals.

According to the amount of paint, the vigour of the gesture and the type of support, the markings on the canvas vary, combining uniformity and difference, repetition, and spontaneity. Toroni works on dinstict surfaces such as canvas, newspaper, cloth, gallery walls, and floors. The minimalist artist puts the emphasis on the materiality of the artwork. uniformity and difference, repetition, and spontaneity. 

Through his practice initiated in 1960s, Toroni explores the notions of authorship and questions the figure of the artist in his paintings. In 1967, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Toroni founded the art collective BMPT. The collective through their artworks called into question notions of authorship and the precedence of the art object over the authorship, leading them to replace subjectivity and expressiveness with neutral, repetitive patterns.