“Red seems to be the only colour that really makes an object sharp and defines its contours and angles”
—Donald Judd
It was with ambivalence that Donald Judd first approached the woodcut medium in 1953. The physical, messy nature of carving the wood initially caused trepidation for an artist who did not like to work with his hands or fuss with tools. Yet, woodcut afforded Judd a crucial vessel for artistic experimentation. Up to this point, Judd’s drawings and lithographs had included flowing lines and blended colours, but the hard birch woodcuts allowed only sharp, clean lines. With the adoption of this medium, Judd was thereby encouraged to graduate from his initial figurative depictions to the clarity and power of his renowned geometric compositions.
Judd’s early woodcuts largely focused on creating the illusion of positive and negative space through a single field of coloured ink. As his career and his experience with the woodcut printing technique developed, Judd continued to experiment with perception, but now through the juxtaposition of multiple colours and the division of pictorial space. In the present lot – produced just one year before the artist died – Judd uses the colours red and black to create his richly inked solids, which are segmented by the stark white of the unprinted paper. The resulting pair of woodcuts epitomise Judd’s mature artistic experimentation and pay homage to his extended engagement with the woodcut printing technique.