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Donald Judd (June 3, 1928 - February 12, 1994) was a minimalist artist whose work sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by the it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy.
Judd was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. He served in the Korean War from 1946-1947 and then began his art studies in 1948 at the College of William and Mary and the Arts Students League in New York City. He earned a degree in philosophy from Columbia University and continued to study art history there under Rudolf Wittkower and Meyer Shapiro.
His first solo exhibition, of expressionist paintings, opened in New York in 1957. His artistic style soon moved away from illusory media and embraced constructions in which materiality was central to the work. Humble materials such as metals, industrial plywood, concrete and color-impregnated plexiglass became staples of his career. Most of his output was in freestanding "specific objects", that used simple, often repeated forms to explore space and the use of space. In 1968 the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a retrospective of his work which included none of his early paintings.
In 1976 he left New York to take a professorship at Oberlin College in Ohio.
In 1979, with help from the Dia Art Foundation, Judd purchased a 340 acre (1.4 km²) tract of desert land near Marfa, Texas which included the abandoned buildings of the former U.S. Army Fort D. A. Russell. The Chinati Foundation opened on the site in 1986 as a non-profit art center. The permanent collection consists of large-scale works by Judd, sculptor John Chamberlain, light-artist Dan Flavin and select others. Judd's work in Marfa includes 15 outdoor works in concrete and 100 aluminum pieces housed in two painstakingly renovated artillery sheds.
References
- Koenig, Kasper, ed. (1975) "Donald Judd: Complete Writings, 1959-1975" Halifax and New York: Nova Scotia College of Art & Design Press / New York University Press.
- Judd, Donald. (1986) "Complete Writings, 1975-1986" Eindhoven, NL: Van Abbemuseum.
- Haskell, Barbara. (1988) "Donald Judd." New York: Whitney Museum of American Art / W.W.Norton & Co.
- Agee, William C. (1995) "Donald Judd: Sculpture/Catalogue" New York: Pace Wildenstein Gallery.
- Kraus, Rosalind E. & Robert Smithson. (1998) "Donald Judd: Early Fabricated Work." New York: Pace Wildenstein Gallery.
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