.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
“Color is like material. It is one way or another, but it obdurately exists. Its existence as it is, is the main fact and not what it might mean, which may be nothing. Or rather, color does not connect alone to any of the several states of the mind. ...Color, like material, is what art is made from.” – Donald Judd
(D. Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular (1993),” rpt. in Donald Judd: The Mutlicolored Works, ed. M. Stockebrand, New Haven and London, 2014, pp. 277-78)
The de-facto leader of the Minimalists and one of the first artists to embrace industrial materials and production, Donald Judd is widely-known for his views on art and its production in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. Untitled is a particularly striking example of the artist’s melding of color, space, and material into what he termed a ‘specific object.’ By bringing together these three elements, Judd was able to break from the traditional modes inherent to the Western canon up until that point. He noted, "Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors—which is the riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be" (D. Judd, 'Specific Objects,' Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax, 1975, p. 181). This construction expands on his initial theories and is part of a larger series of chromatic wall sculptures that more fully embrace ideas of color.
Resembling a series of interconnected open boxes made from formed aluminum and coated with industrial enamel paint, Untitled plays firmly into Judd’s artistic scheme while also working with a then-recent personal revelation: colored enamel. The front portion of the work consists of ten units: four black, two each of light and dark gray, one white, and one of salmon pink. These are contrasted by another series of blocks which are fastened to the wall and exist to offset the audience-facing section, as well as a connecting row on top and bottom. “These combinations [of blocks] are built up in pairs: in each case two colours, one above the other, form a pair, which is rotated on its own axis so that the other colour is above or below. The top of the work repeats the colours of the lower row of the front, while the underside takes up the colours from the upper row. This produces an all-round sculpture, that is to say, a sculpture that presents equal yet different aspects on all its side and fully reveals its interior" (D. Judd, quoted in N. Serota, Donald Judd, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2004, p. 215). Each block is made from enamel-coated aluminum and is attached to the whole by way of slotted hex washer bolts. True to his practice, each piece was manufactured and eschews any inkling of the artist’s hand. The interplay between the various colors and shadows, as well as the alternating sizes, creates a rhythmic push and pull that evokes visual interest while resisting any emotional reading.
Part of Judd’s acclaimed chromatic wall pieces, Untitled has its roots in the summer of 1984, when the artist was commissioned to create an outdoor work for an exhibition in Basel, Switzerland. Rather than pay for works to be shipped overseas from the United States, Judd contacted a Swiss fabricator that was willing to make pieces to his precise specifications. The Lehni Company, a furniture manufacturer near Zürich, bent aluminum sheets and painted them in enamel according to colors Judd selected from the RAL paint chart. This European industrial color matching system enthralled the artist with its regimented system of contrasting and complimentary color schemes (as well as its wide range of hues), and he began using it in earnest to explore his ideas about color. “Color is like material. It is one way or another, but it obdurately exists. Its existence as it is, is the main fact and not what it might mean, which may be nothing. Or rather, color does not connect alone to any of the several states of the mind. ...Color, like material, is what art is made from” (D. Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular (1993),” rpt. in M. Stockebrand, ed., Donald Judd: The Mutlicolored Works, New Haven and London, 2014, pp. 277-278). By having precisely machined aluminum evenly coated with flat enamel, Judd creates objects that exist as treatises on the confluence of pure color and form. The pink, gray, black, and white boxes are both studies in their respective hues as well as discrete but connected objects that would not exist without those tones.
Judd championed his works as ‘specific objects’ in the seminal 1965 text of the same name. Refusing to talk about his pieces as sculptures or paintings, he opened the door for generations of artists interested in the interstitial spaces between artforms. Curator Marianne Stockebrand expands on this idea, explaining, “If we consider his development from a painter to an object maker/architect, and if we consider how much of the painter is perceptible in his objects and vice versa, Judd’s refusal to call his objects 'sculptures' makes all the more sense. His work is closer to an architectural conception of space and the color obsessions of painting than it is to the volumetric articulations of sculpture” (M. Strockebrand, Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works, 2014, p. 10). By creating new terms for his work, Judd set himself apart from the critical discourse of the era (critic Michael Fried famously disagreed with the artist in his 1967 essay “Art & Objecthood”) and helped to establish a theoretical footing for Minimalism, Conceptual art, and untold generations of future artists.
(D. Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular (1993),” rpt. in Donald Judd: The Mutlicolored Works, ed. M. Stockebrand, New Haven and London, 2014, pp. 277-78)
The de-facto leader of the Minimalists and one of the first artists to embrace industrial materials and production, Donald Judd is widely-known for his views on art and its production in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. Untitled is a particularly striking example of the artist’s melding of color, space, and material into what he termed a ‘specific object.’ By bringing together these three elements, Judd was able to break from the traditional modes inherent to the Western canon up until that point. He noted, "Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors—which is the riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be" (D. Judd, 'Specific Objects,' Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax, 1975, p. 181). This construction expands on his initial theories and is part of a larger series of chromatic wall sculptures that more fully embrace ideas of color.
Resembling a series of interconnected open boxes made from formed aluminum and coated with industrial enamel paint, Untitled plays firmly into Judd’s artistic scheme while also working with a then-recent personal revelation: colored enamel. The front portion of the work consists of ten units: four black, two each of light and dark gray, one white, and one of salmon pink. These are contrasted by another series of blocks which are fastened to the wall and exist to offset the audience-facing section, as well as a connecting row on top and bottom. “These combinations [of blocks] are built up in pairs: in each case two colours, one above the other, form a pair, which is rotated on its own axis so that the other colour is above or below. The top of the work repeats the colours of the lower row of the front, while the underside takes up the colours from the upper row. This produces an all-round sculpture, that is to say, a sculpture that presents equal yet different aspects on all its side and fully reveals its interior" (D. Judd, quoted in N. Serota, Donald Judd, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2004, p. 215). Each block is made from enamel-coated aluminum and is attached to the whole by way of slotted hex washer bolts. True to his practice, each piece was manufactured and eschews any inkling of the artist’s hand. The interplay between the various colors and shadows, as well as the alternating sizes, creates a rhythmic push and pull that evokes visual interest while resisting any emotional reading.
Part of Judd’s acclaimed chromatic wall pieces, Untitled has its roots in the summer of 1984, when the artist was commissioned to create an outdoor work for an exhibition in Basel, Switzerland. Rather than pay for works to be shipped overseas from the United States, Judd contacted a Swiss fabricator that was willing to make pieces to his precise specifications. The Lehni Company, a furniture manufacturer near Zürich, bent aluminum sheets and painted them in enamel according to colors Judd selected from the RAL paint chart. This European industrial color matching system enthralled the artist with its regimented system of contrasting and complimentary color schemes (as well as its wide range of hues), and he began using it in earnest to explore his ideas about color. “Color is like material. It is one way or another, but it obdurately exists. Its existence as it is, is the main fact and not what it might mean, which may be nothing. Or rather, color does not connect alone to any of the several states of the mind. ...Color, like material, is what art is made from” (D. Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular (1993),” rpt. in M. Stockebrand, ed., Donald Judd: The Mutlicolored Works, New Haven and London, 2014, pp. 277-278). By having precisely machined aluminum evenly coated with flat enamel, Judd creates objects that exist as treatises on the confluence of pure color and form. The pink, gray, black, and white boxes are both studies in their respective hues as well as discrete but connected objects that would not exist without those tones.
Judd championed his works as ‘specific objects’ in the seminal 1965 text of the same name. Refusing to talk about his pieces as sculptures or paintings, he opened the door for generations of artists interested in the interstitial spaces between artforms. Curator Marianne Stockebrand expands on this idea, explaining, “If we consider his development from a painter to an object maker/architect, and if we consider how much of the painter is perceptible in his objects and vice versa, Judd’s refusal to call his objects 'sculptures' makes all the more sense. His work is closer to an architectural conception of space and the color obsessions of painting than it is to the volumetric articulations of sculpture” (M. Strockebrand, Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works, 2014, p. 10). By creating new terms for his work, Judd set himself apart from the critical discourse of the era (critic Michael Fried famously disagreed with the artist in his 1967 essay “Art & Objecthood”) and helped to establish a theoretical footing for Minimalism, Conceptual art, and untold generations of future artists.