DONALD JUDD
The work of Donald Judd (1928-1994), which grew out of his practice as an abstract painter in the mid-fifties, expanded the traditionally figurative and representational category of sculpture into a pure abstract art form. Although he is considered one of the most important modern sculptors, Judd insisted on the difference between his own work and sculpture. As his work began to take shape in the sixties he believed that he and many other young artists such as Dan Flavin and Robert Morris were creating another category of art altogether, an alternative to sculpture and painting that he named the ‘specific object’. In his important essay ‘Specific Objects’ (1964-5) he described this new art as three-dimensional yet non-anthropomorphic and involved with ‘real space’ instead of illusion.
In 1962, with a series of freestanding painted works incorporating found objects, Judd established the primary concerns of his ‘specific objects’: intense colour, plain surfaces, the use of a rectangular plane and the absence of a sculptural base. Throughout his career he produced works for the wall as well as the floor, which assumed such forms as stacks and rectangular progressions and were made using metal and coloured Plexiglass. The quality of Judd’s art lies in its sensitive handling of scale and proportion, as well as its material beauty, achieved by means of meticulous and detailed construction. Judd also made prints in series, using etching, lithograph and woodcut techniques and experimented with different effects. These were mainly monotypes featuring motifs from his paintings and sculptures, but he also manipulated them with changed colours and the occasional addition of collage. The prints support Judd’s conception of art as a non-referential object and provide a fascinating counterpart to his three-dimensional investigations into form, symmetry and colour.