Donald Judd

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a minute nick to the extreme right edge. The metal sheet is lifting fractionally at the top back left corner where it meets the wall.
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Encapsulating within its pristinely-fabricated, sleek and elegant form the very quintessence of the artist's inimitable oeuvre, Donald Judd's immaculate sculptural wall-piece Untitled of 1975 is enduringly emblematic of this most iconic of artistic careers. Spanning almost two metres in width and projecting almost seventy centimetres from its supporting wall, the scale of this work is truly impressive and unquestionably broadcasts the assured, veritable triumph of a fully-developed mature aesthetic and conceptual dialect.

Instantly identifiable as an archetypal sculpture by this master of Minimalism, this work represents a sophisticated layering of tensions, which collectively organise the viewer's ocular and somatic experience in a way that had been virtually unprecedented in the history of art prior to the radical innovations of Donald Judd. Obtruding from the wall to engage the realm of our corporeal experience, the nature of the present work transforms through our physical interaction with it. When viewed straight on, the dramatic advancement of its metallic form towards us is tempered by the seamless curve of its front face, which incites a powerful sensation of recession and depth. A similar contrast is struck through the nature of its exterior when, depending on the play of light, the appearance of its silvery surface transforms from the perfectly smooth to the apparently rugged crystalline jaggedness characteristic of its galvanized medium. Despite its monumentality, this is a sculpture replete with a quiet subtly that is archetypal of Judd's revolutionary and cerebral practice.

Although initially trained as a painter, Judd's approach to making art fundamentally shifted when he abandoned the two dimensionality of the flat picture plane and explored a new sculptural idiom dependent upon non-subjective, non-expressive forms and industrial media. The extent to which his pioneering efforts had redefined the parameters of what contemporary art could achieve had been widely recognized several years before this work, with his first one-person exhibition, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1968. Reviewing the show, the array of para-industrial monuments of artistic expression were lauded by the critic James Mellow: "make no mistake about it...[Judd's show] constitutes a triumph for a difficult new order of art....The importance of the New York showing, the largest exhibition of his work to date, is that it gives the imprimatur of the establishment to a style which, if not so radically new as the claims made for it, is nonetheless significantly different from the forms of art that preceded it" (James Mellow quoted in: James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, New Haven 2001, p. 248).

Judd was also, of course, an important writer and critic, having penned his seminal text Specific Objects in 1965. In that essay, Judd firmly identified what he saw as problematic about painting and illusionism, the end of representational art, and the need to work in three dimensions utilising what he referred to as "actual space."  For Judd the relationship between his pieces and their environment was critical: the nature of the artwork becoming defined by its own contextual experience. This central tenet, which has proved spectacularly influential to generations of subsequent artists, is beautifully achieved by the present work; a sublimely elegant testimonial to one of the most innovative artists of recent decades.