Color and light comingle while suspended in space in untitled, a luminous turquoise box bisected by a clear panel. Exemplifying the precise formal clarity characteristic of Donald Judd’s singular approach, it represents the culmination of his three-decade long investigation of color, material, and space.
|
Though hung on a wall as a painting, untitled’s implied architectural space and industrial fabrication call into question the physiological dynamics inherent to viewing three-dimensional objects. “This work which is neither painting nor sculpture challenges both,” Judd said of another box piece. “Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusion and literal space, space in and around marks and colors… Actual Space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”[i]
Though Judd’s works embody the same monumental, heroic facets that characterized Abstract Expressionism, they are devoid of all gesture and exist as spatial phenomena in and of themselves. These questions of objecthood and presence were most frequently explored in the shape of a box, Judd’s primary structure, which he selected for the neutrality he considered inherent to the shape. His interrogations of the box—open versus enclosed, vacant or solid—defined nearly his entire oeuvre.
Though Judd ceased making paintings in the early 1960s, his painter’s eye for color stayed with him for his entire career. This predilection became more conspicuous in the last decade of his career, and his final pieces demonstrate an almost exuberant use of color—which in the current work, takes the form of a vibrant blue.
|
|
Donald Judd, untitled, 1969. Saint Louis Art Museum, Artwork © 2020 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Barnett Newman, Onement VI, 1953. Private Collection, Artwork © 2020 Barnett Newman Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |