The Fabricated Elegance of Judd

“I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It’s all right, but it’s already done and I want to do something new.” 

-Donald Judd (1928-1994)

This quote from Judd perfectly embodies how the artist successfully changed the direction of the art historical canon, with the influence of his work transcending visual arts into architecture, design, fashion, and more. The artist is now the subject of a career-spanning retrospective at MoMA. 

I was luckily able to witness the glory of Judd before MoMA’s closure in response to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 13. Judd, a seminal Minimalist artist (a term he rejected), was instrumental in changing how we think about sculpture — though again, he refused traditional vernacular, preferring the term “objects,” embodying a space between painting and sculpture.

Judd is an exhibition bringing together works in all mediums from his career including sculpture, painting, and drawing and is a rare look at a remarkable artist in his first US retrospective in over 30 years. The show is arranged chronologically, starting with his early painterly works and ending with the monumental sculptural pieces at the end of the artist’s career in the early ‘90s. Consisting of five rooms on MoMA’s 6th floor, the show comprehensively allows for an immersive experience of the Judd oeuvre without overstaying its welcome.

Having begun his career as a painter, the beginning of the exhibition contained some of Judd’s geometrically abstract works from the early ‘60s, reminiscent of Frank Stella’s early proto-minimalistic works in the late ‘50s. Other works, such as a wall-bound object and its floor-occupying compatriot, echo a series of colorful red parallel lines.

The first works are visceral and rough around the edges, evincing the hand of the artist and demonstrating the artistic process. These sculptural works show Judd’s early experimentation with his new form of art making. Unsatisfied with the bothersome process and crude look of his homemade objects, Judd realized he could turn to industrial fabrication — a transformational juncture in his career. 

Containing the first of Judd’s fabricated work from Bernstein Brothers Sheet Metal Specialties, who helped carry out Judd’s artistic vision in 1964, the second room truly took my breath away. I was awestruck by the scale and the gravitas of the large format sculptural works in the space. The curation gave carefully executed space to the works and let them breathe but still allowed for thematic groupings that engaged in a meaningful visual dialogue. Judd himself understood the immense importance of place/context, experimenting with and examining how his works interacted with their surroundings. 

The room contained the first iteration of Judd’s “stack works,” seven galvanized iron boxes that jutted out from the wall with uniform distance between them, a format the artist would continue to explore throughout his career. The yellow plexiglass in between the metal portions and its interaction with light creates an illusionary aura around the work. 

It is here that Judd’s explorations between surface, volume, color, and form become most evident. Every work pushes the boundary of the materials themselves, lending a visual tactility to the way each object sits in space while creating new spaces within it. In the third room of the show, I was particularly drawn to an object created of plexiglass and a reflective gold-hued material. A rectangular box with a void in its center, the front and back of the work show the seemingly gilded material while the center is a blue plexi box showing a smaller rectangle encompassing the negative space inside of the work. The artist’s vision is evident here, creating a sculptural work that simultaneously ruminates on conceptions of space while seemingly denying its own dimensionality. 

The show concludes with sculptural objects in two rooms focused on the later portion of Judd’s career. The majority of the penultimate room is occupied by a dazzling, multicolor, long rectangular form from 1991 that occupies as much space as it creates, along with more iterations of other prominent Judd serial works. Upon exiting, I was sent on my way by one last final colorful Judd stack.  

Luckily, Judd runs through July 11, so once the pandemic subsides, there will still be an opportunity to see the show for yourself. When New York as a whole reopens, there is more than enough Judd to go around, with other shows at David Zwirner on West 20 Street, Gagosian on West 21 Street, Mignoni on Madison Avenue, and the Judd Foundation’s 101 Spring Street location.