Untitled (1980)
Donald Judd
DONALD JUDD, 1980, STEEL, ALUMINIUM AND PERSPEX)
When minimalist designers were creating furniture that aspired to sculpture, Donald Judd went the other way. His sculptures speak the language of serial production and functionality, indebted to the history of industrial design as much as that of fine art. His Stack Sculptures, as seen here, were an attempt to remove symbolic meaning from art and focus on the relationship between space and colour. They are evenly hung, the distance between each unit identical to their height, and the number of units dependent on the length of the wall. He removed the possibility of spontaneity in his creation, using commercial fabricators and industrial material to make his work. “The main virtue of geometric shapes,” said Judd, “is that they aren’t organic, as all art otherwise is”.