Donald Judd
Untitled, 1988
Aluminum and Plexiglas
142 23/32 x 39 3/8 x 19 11/16 in. (3 m 62.5 cm x 100 cm x 50 cm)
Museum League Purchase Fund, General Acquisitions Fund, H. Harold Wineburgh Fund, and gift of an anonymous donor, 1990.137.a–f
Art © Donald Judd Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

With its strict geometric forms and cool industrial surfaces, Donald Judd’s work appeared in the early 1960s as a challenge both to the art of its time and to the history of sculpture. Forging an oeuvre that resolutely bypassed references to the outside world, Judd affirmed that form and its place in space could stand as the subject and meaning of a work of art. Many saw Judd’s sculpture as the logical, if bleak, final result of the revolution of abstraction that began in the early 20th century. Others described Judd’s work as embodying the perfection of absolute geometry and creating order out of an increasingly disordered world.

In Untitled, Judd affixed six symmetrically divided rectangular boxes to a wall in a series to form a column nearly twelve feet high. Judd lined the boxes with yellow Plexiglas and bisected each box with an identical central dividing plane. Such elements enforce continuity and cohesion among the work’s six elements. At first glance Untitled, though composed of parts, is seen as an entire work with an uncanny immediacy. These and other aspects of Judd’s art are brilliantly evident in the numerous large-scale industrially forged works that Judd installed in the west Texas town of Marfa, particularly at Marfa’s old army base. Judd’s Marfa installations, like Dallas’s Untitled, forcefully explore the physical and perceptual experience of space, presence, and viewer, and constitute one of the most rigorous and profound treatments of sculpture in contemporary art.