Untitled (85-063)

Material

Yellow, black, white, grey and brown painted aluminium; 29.5 x 150.9 x 29.5 cm

Datierung

1985

About the artwork

‘Untitled (85-063)’ is the elegant embodiment of the artist’s self-proclaimed ambition to fully unify the three elements of material, colour and space. The geometrically devised piece from 1985 refers to the interplay of open and closed spaces by use of colour and brilliance. The combination of luscious yellow, black, white, grey and rich earthen browns abounds with optical energy and represents the aesthetic departure from Judd’s earlier metal and Plexiglas pieces, which had been restricted to the monochromatic colours of raw industrial materials. With Judd’s introduction of a multiplicity of tonal values into his structures, he began to explore both the physical and aesthetic properties of different colour combinations. This experimentation with deep shades of colour contributes to the arresting physical presence of ‘Untitled (85-063)’.
Embodying the reductive purity, Judd selected colours with reverential care and attention, methodically choosing and placing them in harmonious or opposing pairs depending on their tonal value. The projecting metallic boxes open themselves up to the viewer, revealing their interiority. As such Judd produced an all-round sculpture, one in which all aspects are presented as being equal and destroying the frontal primacy of traditional wall-based art, such as painting.
‘Untitled (85-063)’ clearly expresses Judd’s belief in both the optical and expressive power of colour. In 1916, the Spanish Expressionist painter Johannes Itten wrote about the physical properties of colour in art: “Form is also colour. Without colour there is no form. Form and colour are one’. This statement reconciled with Judd’s own views and in 1993, just a year before his death, he concluded that, “It never occurred to me to make a three dimensional work without colour. I took Itten’s premise, which I had not read, for granted… Colour is like material. Colour, like material, is what art is made from. It alone is not art. Colour as the spectrum and colour as material, so to speak, are not the same. ‘
Judd’s famous series of chromatic wall pieces began in the summer of 1984 when the artist was commissioned to create an outdoor work for an exhibition in Merian Park in Basel, Switzerland. Judd decided to seek out a local fabricator who would be able to make the work to his exact specifications as a solution to the cost of transporting the work from the United States. Therefore, Judd began working with the Lehni Company, a furniture manufacturer in Dübendorf east of Zürich, which was able to bend sheets of aluminium and enamel them in various colours selected with Judd’s exacting eye from the commercial RAL paint chart.
“Take a simple form,” Judd once said, “say a box – and it does have an order, but it’s not so ordered that that’s the dominant quality. The more parts a thing has, the more important order becomes, and finally it becomes more important than anything else.” Judd clearly adhered to this belief in ‘Untitled (85-063)’, where the ordered elements, the repeated forms, the regular placing of each part, and the exacting combinations of colour, imply an order that has the potential to continue ad infinitum.

About the artist

Donald Judd studied at Art Students‘ League and philosophy at Columbia University in New York. After early beginnings as a painter, Judd moved from relief-like images to sculpture. His later, large-format, industrially produced works made him one of the most important representatives of Minimal Art. Especially his works which are composed of simple geometrical forms – made of metal, acrylic glass or painted wood – and displayed close to or behind each other on the wall made him famous. Their scantiness implies a particular aesthetics.
The artist perceived an art work always as an entity, rather than seeing it as an aggregation of several focal points. Clarity, objectivity, order and disorder, as well as the abandonment of composition were important to him. To Judd material, space, colour, volume and light are aspects of every-day life and they should be made visible in an art work.
In the 1980s the artist began also to reflect critically on the art business and the treatment of conceptual art.