Donald Clarence Judd was born on June 3, 1928 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. After serving in the United States Army in Korea from 1946-1947, Judd attended the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia; the Art Students League, New York; and Columbia University, New York, where in 1953 he received his B.S. in philosophy and worked towards a master’s in art history under Rudolf Wittkower and Meyer Shapiro. Between 1959-1965, Judd supported himself as an art critic, writing for magazines such as ARTnews,Art Magazine, and Art International.
Judd’s early expression came in the form of paintings, however, his artistic style soon moved away from illusory media and he embraced constructions in which materiality was central to the work. Judd used materials such as metals, plywood, concrete and color-impregnated Plexiglas, that became staples in his artistic practice. Most of his output was in freestanding "specific objects" that used simple, often repeated forms to explore space and its use. During the 1970s, Judd began making room sized installations that transformed the spaces themselves into experiences.
His first solo exhibition was in 1957 at the Panoras Gallery in New York. During his lifetime, Judd exhibited regularly and widely at galleries in New York and across Europe and Japan. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York held two major exhibitions of his work, in 1968 and in 1988, and more recently, the Tate Modern in London held a show of his work in 2004. In 2020, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened the first major U.S. retrospective of the artist’s work in three decades. In 1996, the Judd Foundation was formed following the artist's wishes, in Marfa, Texas and at 101 Spring Street in New York. Judd’s work can be found in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Broad Museum, Los Angeles; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others.
Judd moved to Marfa, Texas in 1972, where he lived and worked until his death on February 12, 1994.
Donald Judd once wrote that an artist’s main challenge is to find “the concatenation that will grow” — in other words, an artistic preoccupation that will sustain a lifetime of development, not peter out by the third or even second show.
Featuring ten stacks from four decades, this is the first-ever exhibition devoted to this iconic form in Judd’s oeuvre and in the history of modern sculpture.
Donald Judd’s stack sculptures dominate galleries. Columns formed from 10 identical wall-mounted boxes in various metals and Plexiglas, each separated by a space that equals its height, they have always seemed to overpower neighboring artworks, brooking no aesthetic dissent in their rigid serial logic. They’re artworks to be admired at a safe, respectful distance, with some trepidation. But Mnuchin’s latest jewel of a show, which has 10 stacks (the most apparently ever assembled in one place) plus a single-box sculpture, feels like a game changer.
Despite being considered the leading artist of the minimalist movement, Judd, who worked at the intersection of art, architecture, and design, eschewed the label. When the minimalist aesthetic first emerged in the 1960s, some critics had snarkier names for it: “ABC,” “Boring,” or “No-Art Nihilism,” for example.
Mnuchin Gallery, on New York's Upper East Side, unveils a selection of 10 of Donald Judd's "stack" sculptures tonight in the newest incarnation of this veteran dealer's gallery.
“Donald Judd: Stacks”
The gallery presents ten pieces from the artist’s iconic sculptural series, “Stacks.” Each consists of multiple sets of boxes, mounted one above the other on a wall. Cool and elegant, these studies in relationships among form, color and space have become Judd’s signature pieces. Mnuchin Gallery, Sept 26–Dec 7.
Austerity wasn’t minimalist artist Donald Judd’s only calling card. At least not in the opinion of art dealer Robert Mnuchin, who is fond of the specific body of work by Judd known as “stacks”: the cool, vertical, wall-mounted arrangements of iron-and-Plexiglas boxes that are, in their industrial materials and repetitive form, evocative of skyscrapers and mass-produced goods. In the right lighting, the colorful examples of these cast gem-toned shadows.
