Untitled

Affixed to the wall, Donald Judd’s 1991 sculpture Untitled hangs suspended in space—a single, brilliantly blue box, bisected down its center by a silvery dividing panel, a superb example the artist’s visionary strain of Minimalism. Characterised by the distilled formal precision characteristic of Judd’s practice, the work’s smooth panels of anodized aluminum combine to produce a self-contained, architectural space in which light and color interact. Judd’s elegantly simple structuration of the work’s vectors allows each panel of the sculpture to be formally distinguished from those around it; as light falls over the structure, its inner faces darken with shadow, the punchy industrial blue of the metal transmuted to a rich navy. Yet at the same time, the work possesses an overarching coherence, divided and at once whole. While the white panel at the heart of the work splits it down the middle, its whiteish colouring sets it apart from the blue, balancing the space without cleaving the composition into two distinct units. Indeed, closer inspection of the work reveals that the divider does not meet the back panel of the box but stops short, producing a single, uninterrupted space that nonetheless appears to be separated in two.

Judd’s view of art was unwaveringly simple, and yet despite that, dealt with its subtlest aspects: “Material, space and color are the main aspects of visual art,’ he once claimed, ‘Everyone knows that there is material that can be picked up and sold, but no-one sees space and color” (D. Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” in N. Serota (ed.), Donald Judd, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2004, p. 154). Untitled demonstrates Judd’s genius for bringing these invisible elements to life: an exploitation of the fundamental qualities of material, space and color from which emerge less tangible things—fluidity, clarity and beauty.