Fabricated with impeccable precision in saturated magenta and silver hues, Untitled is an extraordinary embodiment of the seamless fusion of pure color, pristine industrial materiality and geometric form that distinguishes Donald Judd’s iconic stack sculptures. Executed in 1969 in toweering forty-inch scale – the largest size of this series – Untitled is the superlative example of Donald Judd’s early corpus of stacks, which boldly proclaimed a new aesthetic era upon their emergence in New York during the 1960s. Testifying to their outright significance within Judd’s career, other early 1960’s stack sculptures in this impressive forty-inch scale now belong to prestigious international museum collects ions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Art Institute of Chicago, and Moderna Museet. Vivid magenta Plexiglas layers brilliantly filter light through their iconic stainless-steel structure, creating a diffused violet ambience as the austere installation dominates its surroundings with the philosophical rigors of Judd’s Minimalism. Balancing such visual opulence with Judd’s quintessential industrial means, Untitled is an early and seminal paragon of the artist’s career-long sculptural inquest into the very phenomenologies of material, space and color.

Judd executed his first stack sculpture in 1965; by the end of that decade, he had established a core vocabulary of forms with through which he experimented with various permutations for the next thirty years. In the tradition of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, Judd exploited color and material within the sculptural stack structure to realize full potential, resulting in a remarkable proliferation of closely related works. The result of this experimentation is seen nowhere better than in Untitled with its gleaming magenta Plexiglas fluorescence and industrial stainless-steel austerity, elements both powerfully augmented by the present work’s colossal architectural scale. Consisting of ten evenly spaced 40-inch units arranged vertically on the wall from floor to ceiling, the stacks of Untitled elegantly interrogate the purity of color and the physical properties of space. As Untitled lucidly demonstrates, Judd’s sculpture derives meaning from the interaction of its constituent parts: rejecting compositions founded on hierarchical balance, individual elements are neither subordinate nor dominant in relation to each other.

In Untitled, the meticulously defined space between each individual component is of equal volume to that of the units themselves, reifying negative space as a tangible element of the work in its own right. Elegantly framed by the razor edges of each stainless steel box, emptiness is transformed into form itself, taking on a spatial identity both within and surrounding the sculpture. No longer a void, emptiness becomes a positive entity: a critical element of the viewer’s perception of the installation. “If two objects are close together they define the space in between,” Judd astutely observes. “These definitions are infinite until the two objects are so far apart that the distance in between is no longer space. But then the passerby remembers that one was there and another here. The space between can be even more definite than the two objects which establish it; it can be a single space more than the two objects are a pair” (the artist cited in Ibid., p. 80).

Widely regarded as Donald Judd’s most enduring legacy today, the stacks epitomize the new American art that emerged in the 1950s and early 1960s as the challenge to the thematic allusion and illusionism which had, for centuries, defined canonical art history. Unlike such titans of abstraction as Newman, Pollock, Rothko, and Still—all of whom he considered as immediate precedents for his practice— Judd came to the inevitable conclusion in the early 1960s that painting, no matter how abstract, how reductive, contained some degree of illusionism. In his seminal 1965 treatise “Specific Objects,” Judd writes, “It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting.” (Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” 1965, reproduced in: Donald Judd: The Complete Writings, 1959-1975, New York 2015, p. 187) Eschewing the medium of painting entirely, Judd discovered in the medium of sculpture new opportunity to privilege the totality of a work of art.

Distinguished by its stunning palette, monumental scale, and pivotal early date, Untitled from 1969 is unequivocally among the most striking and seminal examples of Judd’s radical sculptural lexicon. Later alluding to his systematic sculptural investigation of metaphysical properties, Judd concisely wrote: “Material, space and color are the main aspects of visual art" (The artist cited in Dietmar Elger, Ed., Donald Judd Colorist, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2000, p. 79). Untitled perfectly reifies this holistic thesis: the shimmering exterior of the stainless steel dematerializes its otherwise obdurate, opaque form, while the transparent Plexiglas both reveals the interior construction – and, through the translucent passage of light, unites the physical object with the wall support even further. The intense, almost liquid magenta chroma then fills the voids with intangible rays of light that paradoxically serve to augment the sense of tangible space. Untitled creates such a harmonious marriage between material, space and color, epitomizing the expression of Judd's complex aesthetic at its most consummate.

Artist

Donald Judd