Turning to unventured material territory in 1970, Donald Judd conceived a striking group of works that incorporated untreated Douglas fir plywood with acrylic sheets to boldly juxtapose the natural and the industrial. Made of flawlessly fabricated boxes that house three gleaming windows of red Plexiglas, Untitled (86-19 Ballantine) is exemplary of Judd’s career-spanning craftsmanship that continues to challenge our conceptions of material possibility. Collaboratively made with master carpenter Peter Ballantine, who fabricated the wooden component, Judd and Ballantine met in 1968 following a seminar given by the artist at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Shortly after their meeting, Judd and Ballantine worked together for the following 25 years, during which t.mes Ballantine’s masterful craftsmanship would produce some 250 of the artist’s wooden pieces. While Judd’s earlier Douglas fir pieces were composed entirely from plywood, over the course of the series’ evolution Judd introduced colour into his constructions. Presenting an archetypal example from the series, the rich grain of Untitled (86-19 Ballantine) is counteracted by the sumptuous layering of scarlet acrylic that line the box’s interior wall. The effect of Judd’s mastery is a wonderful ode to material marriage, revealing the artist’s unique position in the post-war American sculptural landscape. Mounted on the wall, the present work’s streamlined manipulation and perfect material symbiosis confronts the viewer at eye level, inviting a sustained contemplation of its internal and external architecture.

In exploring the work’s ambient space, the viewer’s ever-changing position uncovers new geometries from alternate vantage points; the fall of shadow in one direction imparts subtle variations in the sumptuous amber tones of reflected light emanating from the flawless Plexiglas inside, while the natural pattern of fluid rippling woodgrain animates the piece’s pristine interior and exterior surfaces. We are invited to look into this box, to peer around the shielding divider bisecting the object’s frontal plane.

During the mid-1960s, Judd conceived a critical artistic framework that spurned the illusionist spatial conceits of traditional art forms; instead, preferring to think in three-dimensional terms that endorsed the work of art as a whole. In his breakthrough treatise of 1965 ‘Specific Objects’, Judd defined a holistic aesthetic philosophy whereby the work of art need only refer to its own internal geometry and external form within the space it occupies: “It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyse one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful. They are not diluted by an inherited format, variations of a form, mild contrasts and connecting parts and areas” (Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 1965, reprinted in: Exh. Cat., Bielefeld, Kunsthalle Bielefeld (and travelling), Donald Judd: Early Work 1955–1968, 2002, p. 94). In the works that were to follow, Judd began abiding by a strict conceptual premise articulated via a discrete vocabulary of three-dimensional forms and materials. Within this self-imposed formal economy Judd created a wealth of works, or ‘Specific Objects’, that he placed directly on the floor or the wall.

Regarded as the leading figure of Minimalism – although Judd himself rejected this categorisation – and amongst the most influential American artists of the twentieth century, Donald Judd challenged the thematic allusion and illusionism which had, for centuries, defined the paintings of canonical art history. Unlike such titans of abstraction as Newman, Pollock, Rothko, Stella and Still – all of whom Judd considered as immediate precedents for his practice – in 1960-61, Judd came to the inevitable conclusion that painting, no matter how abstract, how reductive, contained some degree of illusionism. A work from the artist’s later practice, Untitled (86-19 Ballantine) exemplifies Judd’s lifelong project to eliminate illusion in art through the creation of material objects of elemental force, coexistent within their surrounding space. The single unit of plywood and layered acrylic, hovering elegantly on the wall, encapsulates Judd’s emphasis on issues of site and presentation within space. With a dividing strip, almost zip-like in its Newman-esque bisection of the work’s frontal plane, Untitled (86-19 Ballantine) elegantly expands Judd’s premise on spatial relations and asserts his genius for affecting modulations in colour, surface, and light.

Throughout Judd’s career he created a wealth of astonishingly diverse sculptural works. The visual complexity and multiplicity is largely derived from the implicit difference between Judd’s materials: from Douglas fir plywood used for Untitled to his first stack made using galvanised iron, Judd expanded to stainless steel, aluminium, copper and brass, allowing the characteristics intrinsic to each metal to define and distinguish the individual work. As described by Barbara Haskell, these distinctions “substantiated Judd’s implicit claim that every material possessed formal properties that belonged to it alone and the artist must limit himself that best allowed the materials to speak. Materials were the parts of speech of sculpture. Their properties – surface, colour, thickness, and weight – were sufficient to substitute for the role traditionally filled by ornamentation” (Barbara Haskell quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Donald Judd: Beyond Formalism, 1988, p. 73). Deftly achieving a sublime union of colour, material, and space which initiated the entirety of his sculptural practice, Untitled (86-19 Ballantine) is the ultimate test.mes nt to Judd’s unwavering pursuit of the essential, unshakeable truths of artistic creation; once realised, as eloquently phrased by the artist himself: