In visual arts, music and other media, an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Minimalism in music often features repetition and gradual variation, such as the works of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Minimalism in visual art refers to a specific movement of artists that emerged in New York in the early 1960s in response to Abstract Expressionism and Modernism. Minimalism as an art movement asserted that a work of art should not refer to anything other than itself and should omit any extra-visual association.

Minimalism in painting can be characterised by the use of hard edges, linear lines, simple forms and an emphasis on two dimensions. Minimalism in sculpture can be characterised by very simple geometric shapes often made of industrial materials such as plastic, metal, aluminium, concrete and fibreglass, usually left raw or painted a solid colour.

Minimalism as a visual strategy can be found in the geometric abstractions of painters associated with the Bauhaus, in the works of Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the De Stijl movement, and the Russian Constructivist movement, and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. Minimalism as a formal strategy has been deployed in the paintings of Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso and the architect Mies van der Rohe.