ART-PREVIEW:Donald Judd-Untitled
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: Gagosian Archive
An installation of “Untitled” (1980), the largest single plywood work by Donald Judd is on show at Gagosian Gallery. This is the first time the work has been exhibited in New York since it was originally shown at Castelli Gallery in 1981. The exhibition coincides with “Judd”, a Retrospective of Judd’s work at the MoMA, his first major American museum survey since 1988. Made from Douglas fir, the work is a gridded construction in three parts, each defined by horizontal and diagonal planes. Measuring 24,4-meter-wide, it spans the entire back wall of the gallery. In its fusion of wall- and floor-based formats, the work confirms Judd’s mastery of light and space. It manifests his desire to realize “the simple expression of complex thought” an idea he considered independent of the Minimalist label to which his work was often linked. In addition to his use of aluminum and acrylic sheets, Judd began making objects from plywood in the early 1970s. The neutrality of these industrial mediums and the precise ways in which they could be manipulated and combined allowed Judd to focus on the play and interaction of solidity and absence. The work on display at Gagosian exemplifies his emphasis on calculated proportion and schematic variation. Judd was interested in the self-aware act of looking, and in engagement with raw materials and unadorned forms. Judd preferred to leave his works untitled, as he felt that it allowed viewers to engage more freely with the art. To distinguish individual works, however, the Judd-NGC catalogue raisonné adopted a numbering system, prefixing them with DSS (the initials of the surnames of the three main contributors: Dudley Del Balso, Roberta Smith, Brydon Smith), a classification still in use today. Art historians have broadly divided Judd’s sculptures into three groups: stacks, progressions and bleachers. The material of “Untitled” (1980) is Douglas fir that has been industrially processed into plywood. Judd favoured locally made materials, just as he was drawn to American philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce. Plywood had the advantage of being inexpensive, able to hold its form without warping and could be accurately cut. It was unencumbered by art-historical associations. In the 1960s Judd had worked with painted plywood, for example in his red floor sculptures, while in the early 1970s he began creating larger works in plain plywood.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, New York, Duration: 12/3-11/4/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com
