Deceptively simple in its appearance, Untitled is typical of Judd’s practice. Composed of a complex set of interconnecting elements, the combinations of four colours are stacked on top of one another. When mounted on a wall, Untitled protrudes into space and becomes part painting, sculpture, and concept. Through the adoption of hard-lined geometric shapes and repeated permutations of material, size and colour, the work forces a confrontation with Judd’s radically innovative sculptural practice. Expertly wrought anodised aluminium is paired with vibrant yellow, muted red, green and black/blue to create four identical boxes with a compartment in the middle.

Best known for his abstract, three-dimensional ‘stacks’, ‘boxes’ and ‘specific objects’, Judd became a leading exponent of the growing Minimalist movement. Together with Claes Oldenburg and Frank Stella, he reinvented the terms of an artwork and its construction, by freeing it from representational tradition and creating a holistic philosophy, whereby art need only refer to itself.

“A work needs only to be interesting”, writes Judd in his seminal essay Specific Objects, published in 1965. (Donald Judd cited in: Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, Arts Yearbook 8, 1965. Reprinted in ‘Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975’, Halifax; Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975, p. 184). Judd believed that art should not represent anything; it should simply exist. In his essay, Judd rejected European artistic values of illusion and represented space in favour of an all-new American exploration of colour, space and material, denouncing traditional forms of illusionism in art via representation and instead championing the physical environment as the basis for art. Judd’s essay delineated a critical turning point in his art practice and foreshadowed the trajectory of the artistic canon from that point forward. As an art critic, he believed that art should transcend its representational history and become something unique to itself. In 1962, Judd eschewed painting, as he believed the shape of the canvas was fundamentally representational and began to create ‘specific objects’ – wall mounted or free-standing sculptures with which his name would eventually be identified.

Judd’s practice sought freedom from metaphoric networks and through creating an artwork which refers only to its internal geometric structure and external form within the space it occupies, Untitled achieves this. His simplicity of form and egalitarian treatment of object culminates in a meeting of art object, viewer and space.