“I had always considered my work another activity of some kind... I certainly didn’t think I was making sculpture.”
— Donald JuddDonald Judd’s untitled (Menziken #91-175), 1991, exemplifies the artist’s preoccupation with positive and negative space through his unique privileging of industrial materials. Beginning his career as an abstract painter and shifting into the producer of the Minimalist three-dimensional forms for which he is known today, the present work celebrates the interplays of space and color which are central to the artist’s oeuvre. A pioneer of the Conceptual art movement, Judd and his contemporaries believed that ideas themselves could exist as art, separate from any material conventions. Created just three years before his death in 1994, the present work belongs to the Menziken series, each composed of Swiss-manufactured aluminum and monochrome Plexiglas sheets—here in rich black, a departure from vibrant colors such as Cadmium red and Ultramarine blue. Similar examples of Judd’s later works are housed in private collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Dallas Museum of Art and The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.
Rejecting the tenets of the Abstract Expressionism movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Judd sought out industrial materials for his works, chosen for their pliability and anonymity. Using materials which remove any indication of the artist’s hand, the artist privileges the object over the process. In the 1990s, Judd chose Alu Menziken—a Swiss-based metal processing company—for their aluminum product. Its even, matte sheen reflects light with elegance and subtlety. For the acrylic Plexiglas placed within the rectangular container, Judd here returns to the more monochrome compositions from the earlier part of his career, using the box’s sharp, perfectly shaped edges and corners to highlight the neutrality of the black color. The result is a structure which draws you into a black expanse, almost like a black hole with no beginning or end, except for a thin, bisecting central line of aluminum which breaks our gaze, reminding us that the object is just that—an object.
“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. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful. They are not diluted by an inherited format, variations of a form, mild contrasts and connecting parts and areas.”
—Donald Judd
Judd strove to create “specific objects” - things that refused to reference or represent any real thing in the material world. Intentionally ambiguous, untitled explores the artist’s fascination with the “blank areas, or just the plain areas, and what is seen obliquely, so the color and the plane and the face are somewhat obscure to the front.” This Conceptual notion leaves the interpretation of the sculpture entirely dependent on viewer’s relation to it physically. Through this, Judd’s specific objects hover between fine art and mundane structure, painting and sculpture, creating a dichotomy that is uniquely Judd. Defying the boundaries of art making, the present work rejects classification, turning a seemingly simple box into something much more complex.
