“Materials vary greatly and are simply materials – formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglass, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific.”1
The above quote is taken from Judd’s essay “Specific Objects” first published in Arts Yearbook 8, in 1965 and refers to the many industrial materials available to artists at the time who were making artworks that defied easy classification, the works being neither painting nor sculpture. Judd went on to say, “There is an objectivity of the obdurate identity of a material.”2
Judd rarely made editions of three-dimesional objects. In the mid-1980s, at the request of gallerist Brooke Alexander, Judd agreed to make a limited edition of works to benefit the New Museum in New York. Produced in an edition of forty, this work was first shown at the New Museum’s 1986 event CELEBRATION IV.2 It is made of a folded piece of stainless steel with gaps into which thick sheets of black acrylic are inserted.3
Like the last edition of objects made by the artist in 1991, a group of extruded, color-anodized objects, this work from 1986 can be installed on the wall or laid on any flat, horizontal surface such as a table or floor.