The correction underway now is not a return to white walls. It is something stricter and considerably more demanding.
Experiential minimalism means reducing the number of things in a room until each remaining one has nowhere to hide. Four works in a space built for twenty. A single sound source. One entrance and no obvious route.
The effect is not calm. Emptiness at that scale reads as tension, and tension is what keeps a visitor present.
The interesting decisions have moved into the gaps. How far you walk between pieces, how long the corridor is, whether you can see the next room before you reach it.
These intervals do most of the psychological work. A long approach makes a small object monumental; a short one makes the same object incidental.
This approach is harder to fund, because it looks like less. It photographs badly and it resists the summary that a press release wants.
What it produces is a visitor who stays for forty minutes instead of eight, and who can describe the show a month later without looking at their phone.
Matthew Spears
Exhibition Designer
