DONALD JUDD | Untitled

stamped with the artist's name, numbered 8916 and fabricator BERNSTEIN BROS INC. on the reverse

Pace Wildenstein, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above in 2002)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space... Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.

Donald Judd


Exuding compelling authority and elegance, Untitled from 1989 is an archetypal paradigm of Donald Judd’s seminal sculptures encapsulating the artist’s most significant interests; first and foremost, a sculptural object installed on the wall, the intangible engagement with the void, and most basically, the continual reworking and elaboration of an existing serial construction. The iconic form of the rounded “bullnose” progression, first formulated in 1964, was one that Judd returned to frequently over the course of his career. Originally rendered in galvanized iron, Judd progressed to stainless steel, copper, brass and finally anodized aluminum, allowing the characteristics intrinsic to each distinct metal to define and distinguish the individual work. As described by Barbara Haskell, these distinctions “substantiated Judd’s implicit claim that every material possessed formal properties that belonged to it alone and the artist must limit himself [in order to allow] the materials to speak. Materials were the parts of speech of sculpture. Their properties—surface, color, thickness, and weight—were sufficient to substitute for the role traditionally filled by ornamentation” (Barbara Haskell, “Donald Judd: Beyond Formalism,” in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and traveling), Donald Judd, 1988, p. 73).

The eloquent scion of sculptural Minimalism, Judd is currently being honoured at the Museum of Modern Art in his first major US retrospective in over three decades. Judd first catapulted to critical acclaim upon the debut of his first one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1968. The exhibition traced Judd's development since 1962, spanning the seminal years during which the artist formulated his critical ideas about art and developed the fundamental forms and compositions that would occupy him throughout his oeuvre. His forms and progressions were lauded by the critic James Mellow: "make no mistake about it...[Judd's show] constitutes a triumph for a difficult new order of art. […] The importance of the New York showing, the largest exhibition of his work to date, is that it gives the imprimatur of the establishment to a style which, if not so radically new as the claims made for it, is nonetheless significantly different from the forms of art that preceded it" (James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 2001, New Haven, p. 248). Even Clement Greenberg conceded the success of the show in addition to the verifiable triumph and veracity of the Minimalist movement as a result. "It is hardly two years since Minimal Art first appeared as a coherent movement, and it is already more the rage among artists than Pop or Op ever was" (Ibid, p. 247).

Judd was indisputably a key figure associated with the emergence of Minimal art during the 1960s; trained as a painter, he sought to break from that medium and move his work into three dimensions. His "specific objects," fabricated from industrial materials, are literal in their shape, structure, and support, wherein the three-dimensional whole is more important than the individual parts. Judd's first progression dates from 1964, and was a structure characterized by a Fibonacci mathematical premise in that intervals "progressively" increased while the width of the segments "progressively" decreased. Judd had been making other sculptural wall reliefs the previous year, but found endless possibilities in this radical new form. As early as 1964, Judd began to have his sculptures constructed by the metalworking fabricator Bernstein Bros.; having famously sought to abandon any evidence of the authorial hand, he was one of the first artists to fabricate his works in close collaboration with specialised craftsmen. In doing so he pioneered an approach to art making subsequently appropriated by numerous other artists including Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.

What at first glance may appear quotidian is in fact, far from it. Judd’s works emphasize predetermined, repetitive, self-contained forms that reject hierarchical composition, activate negative space, and successfully deny art historical classifications such as painting, sculpture, or architecture; instead existing themselves as pure ‘object’.  Judd explains, “It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting” (Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” 1965, reproduced in Donald Judd: The Complete Writings, 1959-1975, New York, 2015, p. 187). First developed through his progressions and later expanded in his stacks, such a philosophy compels the viewer to focus on the object itself and its relationship with the space around it. In doing so, Judd achieves his central tenet: that the nature of the artwork becomes defined by its own contextual experience. The seductively luminous gold surface of the present work catches light along the seamless iterations of curves, which creates a powerful sensation of depth as it protrudes, repeatedly, into space. Untitled thus serves as a quintessential culmination of Judd’s unwavering pursuit of the essential, unshakeable truths of artistic creation; once realized, as eloquently phrased by the artist himself, "what lingers on is almost a motionless apparition—of surface and color only, and reflected light, glow, shadows. That is, I believe, when a piece becomes real—and beautiful" (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., New York, Pace Wildenstein, Donald Judd, 2004, p. 8).