ART-PRESENTATION: Donald Judd
Starting out as a painter as well as a prolific critic and essayist, Donald Judd began making three-dimensional works in the early 1960s, aiming to purge his practice of the illusionism associated with painting and to distance it from grand philosophical statements. Toward the end of the decade, he became increasingly driven to install works permanently, beginning at 101 Spring Street, New York. In 1973, he began acquiring buildings in Marfa with the same principle in mind, also using them as sites in which to live and work.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Donald Judd” presents a group of works from 1977–1991, that has never previously been exhibited, alongside seminal floor works which remain at the core of Judd’s practice. The earliest example of this type of incised cadmium red light floor work was exhibited in Judd’s first ever solo exhibition at Green Gallery, New York (1963–64) and now forms part of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection. Highlights of the exhibition include three rectangular plywood floor works – one with a plain plywood surface and two painted in Judd’s signature color (cadmium red light). The wood boxes are relatively inert as forms, with height being the smallest of their dimensions. Each work features an aluminum inlay of varying configurations set into the upper exterior plane. With his free-standing wooden floor works, Judd had liberated himself from the wall and thus from pictorial associations. He consistently returned to forms first used early in his career and worked on a new group of rectangular floor boxes, from which the three works in the exhibition originate, from 1989 onwards. These works, fabricated in Douglas fir plywood, are either painted cadmium red light or unpainted. Placed directly on the floor, level with the viewer, the plywood works eliminate any factual or conceptual demarcation from their surroundings. The cadmium red light underlines Judd’s deliberate use of color, which he viewed as something physical, a concrete formal entity. The cadmium red conveyed the shape of objects more precisely than darker hues, by defining their edges and the structure of their surfaces. Judd had used cadmium red light paint on wood since 1961. Two wall works, made from clear anodized aluminum and lined with colored plexiglass, recall Judd’s signature format of vertical stacks. Yet the horizontally orientated, open rectangular boxes and the component units within are composed using a different set of parameters. Instead of a closed form that projects from the wall, the works are frontally orientated, allowing the viewer to peer into the units. The earliest work in the exhibition, a plywood wall-mounted box from 1977, is on show for the first time. The works from this group are also referred to as “meter boxes”, since they very specifically measure 100 x 50 x 50 cm. Judd’s first three-dimensional works had been constructed in wood and he favored this material for its rigidity and high stability that allowed for great precision. Judd favored an approach to production borrowed from industrial processes and established the manufacturing of his artworks as a collaborative effort between himself and technical experts. The skilled manufacturing processes and craftsmanship allowed Judd to continuously challenge material boundaries in his ongoing work. In the early 1990s, he designed a template through which aluminum was extruded and then anodized. This resulted in a series of 12 differently colored forms, three of which are presented in the exhibition, in yellow, turquoise and black-green (all 1991). These works demonstrate Judd’s ongoing exploration of the principles of space and form, with a particular focus on color, while the meticulous geometric construction emphasizes the purity of the material.
Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, Salzburg, Austria, Duration: 24/7-28/8/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net
