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Artist or Maker: Donald Judd (1928-1994)
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Provenance: Peter Bonnier Gallery, New York
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Notes: "Cor-ten steel introduced a brown color with a velvety surface into Judd's palette, which inspired him to explore new territory and to create works that, in contrast to the metals used hitherto, absorb rather than radiate light. Cor-ten has an evenly matt, slightly grainy surface in a warm mid-brown. Judd perceived it more as a color than as a material - unlike galvanized iron or aluminum, for instance - and it was this quality that stimulated his sense of color and led him to produce single and multi-part works that revolve around the color of Cor-ten" (N. Serota, Donald Judd, London, 2004, p. 241), 2004, p. 241).
In the present work, executed in 1992, Judd combined Cor-ten steel with the dark and reflective tones of black Plexiglas. The combination of identical size boxes mathematically arranged at fixed intervals show a significant progression from the artist's trademark stacks began in 1965. Judd presents the viewer with a exploration of the interplay between negative and positive spatial values, subtle lighting shifts, and multi-part relationships and concepts of repetition, color and divisions of volume. This style of stacks, developed in the mid-1980s, is usually comprised of six units rather than ten which Judd combined in earlier stacks. This smaller scale endows the work with an intimate, physical, and almost vertical figural presence. This intimacy is further accentuated by the warm and grainy surface of the individual Cor-ten units that encase the black Plexiglas. Each unit offers the viewer its own optical experience dependent upon one's position in relation to the stack. Judd considered this work three-dimensional, not an anthropomorphic object. The viewer can enter any one of the six units from a myriad of angles to experience the play of color, light, and perception.
Judd crafted his first vertical stack in 1965 and continued to develop this form throughout his career. Even though these structures are technically considered sculptural reliefs due to their wall support, Judd referred to these arrangements as "specific objects," three-dimensional works that are neither painting nor sculpture. His pieces evolved from low to high relief and the material he used fluctuated between galvanized iron and plywood to Cor-ten steel and Plexiglas. Judd's interest in color and its carrier becoming one led to his color study devotion during the last ten years of his career. He considered color, along with space and materials, one of the three elements that comprise the distinguishing features of art. Judd successfully projected color into space with his three-dimensional works by following his initial attempts at distributing color across a canvas.
The verticality of units in this stack and their placement next to each other propose the concept of infinity. Like Jackson Pollock canvas reaching beyond one's field of vision, Judd's "Untitled" stack achieves a comparable monumentality. On the importance of Judd's stacks, their artistic legacy, and Judd's unquestionable influence on others, Richard Serra had this to say several weeks after Judd's passing:
"They convey a public space, an expanse, a vastness derived from openness but not contained by a closed solution. Judd was one of the first to deal with the contained interior space and surrounding space simultaneously by emphasizing the continuity from the inside out" (R. Serra, "Donald Judd," Artforum, 10 Summer 1994, pp. 113-114).
