Judd Foundation

This brass wall piece is one meter wide and half a meter high and deep. A brass plane spans the top back corner of the piece to the bottom front edge, dividing it diagonally in half. In 1983, Donald Judd wrote, “1 to 2 is just as particular, is —not ‘has’—as much its own quality, as red, or red and black, or black and white, or a material. Also there can be more than one 1 to 2 rectangles. These can comprise solids and volumes. The proportioned rectangles can make a coherent, intelligent space. They can make a credible, intelligent generality. They themselves are specific.”¹

Judd used brass in his works beginning in 1964 and continued to use it throughout his career. The color inherent in different metals was important to Judd in his thinking about what material to use in a work. As he described in a conversation about his shift from painting to making works in three dimensions, “Part of the things that I thought about involved color; part of the problems I couldn’t solve in the painting involved color. And it never even occurred to me not to have color. So, in a way, mine is the first three-dimensional work with color. You can find exceptions, in Arp’s or Schwitters’ reliefs, and so forth. Or you can say that Brancusi used color with the brass, which is color too—but basically it’s the first work with color.”²

¹ Donald Judd, “Art and Architecture” (1983), in Donald Judd Writings, ed. Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray (New York: Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books, 2016), 348.

² “Donald Judd in Conversation with Regina Wyrwoll,” Chinati Foundation newsletter 14, October 2009, 30.