Donald Judd

Untitled, 1976

Aluminum and anodized aluminum
8 1/4 x 161 x 8 in. (21 x 408.9 x 20.3 cm.)

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Though best known for his sculpture associated with Minimalism, Donald Judd was also a prolific writer and published countless reviews and essays from the late 1950s until the year before his death. His best-known essay, “Specific Objects,” published in 1965, dictates: “Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other.” This untitled wall work is a type of form Judd developed in the mid-1960s that illustrates many of the concepts the artist discusses in his 1965 essay, particularly the relationships between color, space, and the object. Comprising two simple elements—green anodized aluminum boxes running beneath and behind one long rectangular aluminum tube—the work is mounted to the wall, not unlike a painting, yet it occupies space in three dimensions. Viewed straight on, the work becomes a flat image of lines and voids, but its dimensionality is revealed when viewed from above or from either side. The work occurs in space but does not represent it—Judd was not interested in illusionism, and he championed work that had presence and existed in real space, writing: “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 riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. […] Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”

Exhibition:

May 20 - August 13, 2017

Coinciding with the exhibition Roni Horn, the Nasher Sculpture Center’s curators have chosen works from the Nasher Collection to complement Horn’s installation and draw connections between Horn and artists of the distant and more recent past. Horn is an avid reader and frequently includes excerpts of literary texts in the subtitles of her works, as with her cast glass sculptures on view in the adjacent gallery. Literary themes appear prominently in other bodies of work too, notably in Horn’s drawings, in which the artist combines excerpts from literature with idiomatic phrases, and also in a series of aluminum sculptures in which the artist embeds the words of poet Emily Dickinson.