Untitled (85-062 LEHNI)

Details

Donald Judd (1928-1994)
Untitled (85-062 LEHNI)
stamped 'DONALD JUDD 85-062 LEHNI AG SWITZERLAND' (on the reverse)
painted aluminium
11 7/8 x 59 x 11 7/8in. (30 x 150 x 30cm.)
Executed in 1985

Provenance

The Contemporary Art Gallery, Saison, Tokyo.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1989.

Special notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 15% on the buyer's premium

Further details

The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was opened in 1989 with the specific purpose of exhibiting about 180 works from the private collection of Mr. Shingo Ito, a local junior high school teacher in Tokyo. More than 30 years ago, Shingo began collecting Contemporary art, mainly from the 1960s onwards, and centering around Beuys and the Fluxus artists. In addition to holdings such as the present Donald Judd, the Kiyosato museum also boasts the largest collection of Joseph Beuys works in Japan.

The building and gallery spaces were designed to maximise the viewer's experience and to show the works in the best possible environment. Another major goal was to create an atmosphere where even the novices of the Contemporary art world would feel at home, and be able to openly discuss and explore their own senses and ideas. The experience of visiting the museum is further augmented by the impressive library and archive which also features rare audio and visual recordings. Mr. Shugo Ito, the older brother of Shingo, is currently serving as Director of the museum and has been instrumental in keeping it a venue for new discoveries.

Lot Essay

'Itten wrote in 1916: 'Form is also color. Without color there is no form. Form and color are one.’ It never occurred to me to make a three dimensional work without color. I took Itten’s premise, which I had not read, for granted...Color is like material. It is one way or another, but it obdurately exists. Its existence as it is the main fact and not what it might mean, which may be nothing... No immediate feeling can be attributed to color. Nothing can be identified. If it seems otherwise, usually the association is cultural, for example, the light blue and white, supposedly the colors of peace, of the cops and the United Nations. If there were an identifiable feeling to red or to red and black together they would not be useable to me... Color , like material, is what art is made from. It alone is not art. Itten confused the components for the whole. Other than the spectrum, there is no pure color' (D. Judd, 'Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’ 1993, in D. Elger (ed.), Donald Judd: Colorist, exh. cat., Ostfildern-Ruit 2000, pp. 110-14).

Untitled (85-062 LEHNI)

Lot Essay

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