Donald Judd
“Artworks: 1970–1994”
New York, 519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street
Artworks: 1970–1994, a survey exhibition devoted to Donald Judd that will be on view across all three of the gallery’s West 19th Street locations in New York. Presented concurrently with The Museum of Modern Art’s full-scale retrospective, this exhibition will focus on a selection of works within Judd’s oeuvre drawn from both public and private collections.
With the intention of creating straightforward work without recourse to grand philosophical statements, Judd eschewed the classical ideals of representational sculpture to create a rigorous visual vocabulary that defines objects as its primary mode of articulation. The unaffected, direct quality of his work demonstrates Judd’s strong interest in color, form, material, and space, thus establishing him as one of the most significant American artists of the postwar period.
Image: Donald Judd / Judd Foundation, The Artist and Politics: A Statement, 1970. Donald Judd Text © 2020 Judd Foundation. Photo by Alyssa Meadows
Rigorously experimental, Judd would often challenge his own axioms—altering his materials, sequencing, and formats. Exceptional, but in line with Judd’s thinking about material, proportion, and color, the works in the show range from expansive installations to self-contained single units, yielding valuable new insights into his process and masterful approach to form. As the artist described it in 1987, “I’m very meticulous about the logic of my pieces. But you should only consider logic up to a certain point, because, after all, all the interesting stuff is something else.”
Untitled, 1992-1993/2020 Set of twenty (20) woodcuts in cadmium red, cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, cobalt blue, permanent green, viridian green, black, and alizarin crimson on handmade Korean paper Each: 23 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches 60 x 80 cm
Curated by Flavin Judd, artistic director of Judd Foundation, the exhibition will include one of the artist’s largest and most intricate installations conceived of by Judd from 1986, comprised of thirty wall-mounted plywood boxes. Each box measures one meter by one meter and is backed with acrylic sheets in various colors. Last presented in New York in Judd’s 1988 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it debuted, the installation is organized according to a complex internal logic that is at once mathematical and visible.
Also featured will be a large-scale work from 1970 consisting of galvanized iron panels each measuring five feet tall and placed end to end flat against a wall so as to create a contiguous band along the perimeter of the room, emphasizing the gallery space as an integral component of the work. Originally created for the front room of the Leo Castelli Gallery on East 77th Street in New York, this architectural incursion engages the viewer phenomenologically.
Other works present variations on some of Judd’s most recognizable forms, executed in materials such as Cor-ten steel, copper, plywood, brushed aluminum, and enameled aluminum. These include two nearly twelve-foot-long multicolor aluminum boxes stacked vertically, a copper wall-mounted box featuring a patterned progression of divisions, and a stack of six Cor-ten steel boxes backed with black acrylic sheets with undulating internal divisions, among others.
