Donald Judd Untitled (87-29 Studer) 1987 Painted and unpainted aluminium in two parts. Each: 30 x 360 x 30 cm. (11 13/16 x 141 3/4 x 11 13/16 in). Stamped with signature, inscription, number and date ‘AG Donald Judd 87-29 A und B STUDER’ on the reverse of each unit.
Provenance Galerie Lelong, Paris; Galerie Jamileh Weber, Zurich Literature Exhibition catalogue, Sprengel Museum Hannover and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Donald Judd Colorist, Hannover, 2000, p.63 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “Johannes Itten wrote in 1916: ‘Form is also colour. Without colour there is no form. Form and colour are one.’ It never occurred to me to make a three dimensional work without colour. I took Itten’s premise, which I had not read, for granted … Colour 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 … Colour, 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 colour … I like the colour [red] and I like the quality of Cadmium Red Light. [It has] the right value for a three-dimensional object. If you paint something black or any dark colour, you can’t tell what its edges are like. If you paint it white, it seems small and purist. And the red, other than a gray of that value, seems to be the only colour that really makes an object sharp and defines its contours and angles.” (Donald Judd ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’, 1993 and as cited in J. Coplans, Don Judd, Pasadena, 1971, p. 25). The present lot, Donald Judd’s Untitled (87-29 Studer), is one of his largest and most accomplished wall-mounted sculptures from the critically acclaimed Swiss Box series. Began in 1983, the series allowed Judd, a foremost artist of the Minimalist movement, a new-found exuberance as a colourist. Previously, his palette had been largely restricted to the colours of raw metals and Plexiglas, but with such works as Untitled (87-29 Studer) Judd started incorporating the brilliant hues of industrial paints in his sculptures treating colour formally as an object. In a manner reminiscent of his German peer Gerhard Richter Judd chose his bright paint colours from the RAL Colour Chart, a standard industrial chart of commercial paint colours, and then applied the paint to his sculptures directly from its tin unaltered. While some modules of Untitled (87-29 Studer) are left as raw unpainted aluminium and others painted plain white or black, several interspersed modules are covered in Capri blue, golden yellow and traffic orange, lending the overall composition a certain poetic flow. The composition’s rhythmic beat is further enhanced by the alternating sizes of the open boxes screwed to one another recalling the classic grids of abstract colourist painter Piet Mondrian “Judd’s interest in color is closely connected with his mention of ‘beauty’ as an attribute that could be used as a criterion in viewing his art. With the group of horizontal, sheet-aluminum wall pieces begun in 1983, where he uses a whole number of colors, this interest took on greater importance. Here color takes on a leading role, creative role. Judd used open aluminum boxes in different formats and screwed them together to create objects up to 450 cm in length. In addition he made a number of wall pieces – some high, some two-part. For this group, Judd chose exclusively boldly colored gloss paints, which were enameled into the material by means of a relatively complicated process. Where he had previously concentrated on a maximum of two colors, now he put together complex, strongly contrasting color combinations, generally in multiples of two (4, 6, 8 etc.). In doing so, he was careful to distribute the colors so that no adjacent units were in the same shade.” (D. Elger, ed., Donald Judd Colorist, Ostfildern, 2000, p. 27). Read More Artist Bio Donald Judd American • 1928 - 1994 Donald Judd was an American artist known for large-scale minimalistic sculptures, which he personally referred to as "specific objects." Though associated with Minimalism, Judd did not wish to be confined to this categorization and felt that his work was more compl
Donald Judd Untitled (87-29 Studer) 1987 Painted and unpainted aluminium in two parts. Each: 30 x 360 x 30 cm. (11 13/16 x 141 3/4 x 11 13/16 in). Stamped with signature, inscription, number and date ‘AG Donald Judd 87-29 A und B STUDER’ on the reverse of each unit.
Provenance Galerie Lelong, Paris; Galerie Jamileh Weber, Zurich Literature Exhibition catalogue, Sprengel Museum Hannover and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Donald Judd Colorist, Hannover, 2000, p.63 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “Johannes Itten wrote in 1916: ‘Form is also colour. Without colour there is no form. Form and colour are one.’ It never occurred to me to make a three dimensional work without colour. I took Itten’s premise, which I had not read, for granted … Colour 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 … Colour, 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 colour … I like the colour [red] and I like the quality of Cadmium Red Light. [It has] the right value for a three-dimensional object. If you paint something black or any dark colour, you can’t tell what its edges are like. If you paint it white, it seems small and purist. And the red, other than a gray of that value, seems to be the only colour that really makes an object sharp and defines its contours and angles.” (Donald Judd ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’, 1993 and as cited in J. Coplans, Don Judd, Pasadena, 1971, p. 25). The present lot, Donald Judd’s Untitled (87-29 Studer), is one of his largest and most accomplished wall-mounted sculptures from the critically acclaimed Swiss Box series. Began in 1983, the series allowed Judd, a foremost artist of the Minimalist movement, a new-found exuberance as a colourist. Previously, his palette had been largely restricted to the colours of raw metals and Plexiglas, but with such works as Untitled (87-29 Studer) Judd started incorporating the brilliant hues of industrial paints in his sculptures treating colour formally as an object. In a manner reminiscent of his German peer Gerhard Richter Judd chose his bright paint colours from the RAL Colour Chart, a standard industrial chart of commercial paint colours, and then applied the paint to his sculptures directly from its tin unaltered. While some modules of Untitled (87-29 Studer) are left as raw unpainted aluminium and others painted plain white or black, several interspersed modules are covered in Capri blue, golden yellow and traffic orange, lending the overall composition a certain poetic flow. The composition’s rhythmic beat is further enhanced by the alternating sizes of the open boxes screwed to one another recalling the classic grids of abstract colourist painter Piet Mondrian “Judd’s interest in color is closely connected with his mention of ‘beauty’ as an attribute that could be used as a criterion in viewing his art. With the group of horizontal, sheet-aluminum wall pieces begun in 1983, where he uses a whole number of colors, this interest took on greater importance. Here color takes on a leading role, creative role. Judd used open aluminum boxes in different formats and screwed them together to create objects up to 450 cm in length. In addition he made a number of wall pieces – some high, some two-part. For this group, Judd chose exclusively boldly colored gloss paints, which were enameled into the material by means of a relatively complicated process. Where he had previously concentrated on a maximum of two colors, now he put together complex, strongly contrasting color combinations, generally in multiples of two (4, 6, 8 etc.). In doing so, he was careful to distribute the colors so that no adjacent units were in the same shade.” (D. Elger, ed., Donald Judd Colorist, Ostfildern, 2000, p. 27). Read More Artist Bio Donald Judd American • 1928 - 1994 Donald Judd was an American artist known for large-scale minimalistic sculptures, which he personally referred to as "specific objects." Though associated with Minimalism, Judd did not wish to be confined to this categorization and felt that his work was more compl
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.jpg "Source: Christie's")
.jpg "Source: Christie's")
