ART CITIES:Paris-Donald Judd

Donald Judd preferred to describe his style and oeuvre as “the simple expression of complex thinking”. To Judd, his works, which he called “specific objects,” were neither paintings nor sculptures but simply autonomous objects which were merely self-referential since they did not represent anything else. These objects were created using everyday industrial materials with the intention of eliminating any kind of personal imprint.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Archive

With a focus on freestanding floor works and wall-based works, the exhibition with works by Donald Judd on presentation at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, brings together key works, spanning three decades from 1963 to 1993. The exhibition constitutes a diverse overview of Judd’s distinctive use of industrial materials, such as plywood, aluminium and acrylic sheets. The works reveal a continuing investigation into the nature of space, form and material, with a particular emphasis on color. In the 1950s, Donald Judd studied philosophy and art history and took classes at the Art Students League in New York. He was first publicly recognized as an art critic, writing reviews for Arts magazine from 1959–65. It was during this time that he developed from an abstract painter into the producer of the hollow, rectilinear volumes for which he became well known. Key to this transformation was his essay “Specific Objects” (1965). The text celebrated a new kind of artwork untethered from the traditional frameworks of painting and sculpture, focusing instead on an investigation of “real space,” or three dimensions, using commercial materials and an emphasis on whole, unified shapes. In 1964 Judd turned to professional sheet-metal fabricators to make his work out of galvanized iron, aluminum, stainless steel, brass, and copper. This effectively removed from the artist’s studio any hands-on art making, a shift that would hold great importance for the then-rising generation of Conceptual artists, who held that ideas themselves, exempt from any materialization, can exist as art. In the mid-to-late 1960s, Judd produced and exhibited a large number of his iconic forms. These range from what are referred to as “stacks”, which are hung at even intervals from floor to ceiling; “progressions”, whose measurements follow simple numerical sequences; bull-nosed shaped protrusions from the wall; and box-like forms that are installed directly on the floor. This sculptural vocabulary continued to serve as a basic foundation from which Judd developed many versions, in varied combinations of metals, colored Plexiglas, and plywood until his death in 1994. Highlights of the exhibition include an early freestanding floor work, a monumental “progression” work, a large aluminium floor piece with acrylic divider, and a group of late wall-mounted boxes. In the first-floor gallery, a set of 15 “aquatints”, a group of woodcuts and silkscreen prints will be shown alongside an example of Judd’s furniture, Plywood Bench 76. The exhibition includes one of Judd’s earliest three-dimensional works, “untitled” (1963), presented in France for the first time. Drawing directly from his earlier paintings, which also employ the use of red-cadmium paint, the work marks his departure from painting to working in three-dimensions, which he described as a decisive move into ‘real space’. The use of rectangular forms at a right angle liberated Judd from the one-dimensional plane of painting, setting the ground for his more widely known works included in this exhibition. Judd later developed horizontal “progression”’ that incorporate the absent space across the wall. In “untitled” (1970), a central aluminium bar is juxtaposed above a set of eight purple aluminium boxes, which increasingly ‘progress’ in length. Extending over 6 metres long, the work dominates the longest wall of the gallery, inviting the viewer to move around the piece to understand its inner logic. The organisation of empty space defined and circumscribed between materials is a central preoccupation for Judd, who considered it to be as important as visible tangible materials. In the central gallery, a 1-metre-high freestanding open-box in anodised aluminium reveals its deep blue interior, “untitled” (1989) is remarkable for its treatment of volume, material and, particularly, colur. The work was originally conceived to be exhibited alongside 11 other variations at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, in Germany in 1989. The technical treatment of the anodised aluminium creates a subtle reflective surface, which is reactive to modulations in the surrounding natural light. In the series of anodised aluminium wall-mounted works shown alongside “untitled” (1989) acrylic sheets of varying colours and opacity create an indefinite sense of colour and depth, varying with one’s own position and height.

Info: Curator: Flavin Judd, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 Rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 6/4-15/6/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.ropac.net