Minimalist-Spiritualist, John McCracken dies at 76

LOS ANGELES TIMES
April 10, 2011

Squidds & Nunns 1998

NEW YORK - John McCracken, an artist whose fusion of painting with geometric sculpture in the mid-1960s came to embody an aesthetic distinctive to postwar Los Angeles, died Friday in New York. He was 76. McCracken had lived in Santa Fe, N.M., since 1994. McCracken’s work further challenged the notions of Minimalism through his interest in spiritual phenomena. "My tendency," McCracken once said, "is to reduce or develop everything to 'single things' — things which refer to nothing outside [themselves] but which at the same time possibly refer, or relate, to everything." In 1971-72 he made a rarely seen series of paintings based on Hindu and Buddhist mandalas. [link]