Alan Charlton describes his work with characteristic understatement: “I am an artist who makes a gray painting”—a declaration that seems just as minimal as the paintings themselves. And since 1970, true to his word, this protagonist of British conceptual Minimalism has consistently hewed to monochromatic painting in gray, developing his works as specific objects based on clearly proportioned constructions. Reduction, in Charlton’s work, is primarily a means for generating complex and exacting formal relations—between painting and its support medium as well as between the work, the