Donald Judd

Another artist that I found when researching Minimalist artists for my semester 2 project was the American artist Donald Judd, along with Carl Andre he is one of the most well known artists within the movement.

Judd rejected traditional painting and sculpture which led him to make art that built upon the idea of the object as it is, that exists in the environment. This is a similar ideology that is important to me, I make artwork that I want to exist within a space so that viewers can spectate my work and react to the environment that it is in, Judd created artwork that was free of emotion, to accomplish this task he created works comprising of single or repeated geometric forms produced from industrialized materials that removed the artist's touch. Judd's geometric and modular creations have often been criticized for a seeming lack of content; it is this simplicity, however, that calls into question the nature of art and that posits Minimalist sculpture as an object of contemplation, one whose literal and insistent presence informs the process of beholding.

When researching more on Judd and his work, I was particularly interested in his early three dimensional floor pieces from the 1960's. Untitled (1968) is a freestanding, aluminium rectangle coloured with brown enamel. This piece caught my attention as Judd placed a simple, rectangular form directly onto the floor of the gallery so that it demands recognition through its insistent materiality as well as through the fact that it impinges upon the viewer's passage through the space.

Another artwork that I found inspiring and has influenced my work was Untitled (1980). Judd turned to the creation of vertically-suspended stacks whose emphasis on the upright strongly suggests a repetition of the observer's own body, a fact that serves to create a strong and unique relationship between two material presences.