DONALD JUDD
Excelsior Springs (USA), 1928 – New York,(USA) 1994 

He enrolled at the Art Students League in New York in 1948, and that year he also began studying philosophy and art history at the University of Columbia. In 1957 he began to combine his activity as a painter with art criticism in magazines such as Art News and Arts Magazine. Although he opted for abstraction in the early fifties, by the end of the decade he was focusing on painting that lacked any spatial evocation or reference, undertaking an exploration of form of an essentially geometrical nature that incorporated a mixture of influences, such as Klein’s monochromes and the treatment of matter and especially colour by Chamberlain and Oldenburg. The progressive emphasis on the object aspect in his work led to his first reliefs and free-standing pieces in three dimensions, which he showed in various group exhibitions before the solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1963 that brought recognition of his Minimal works. Very soon he began to apply techniques of repetition and serial production, for which he used mathematical progressions that excluded any subjective distortion. An exhibition at Leo Castelli in 1966 enabled him to present his work in metal, in which he accentuated the purely visual, artificial quality of his pieces. At the end of the decade –during which he began to teach at Yale- he increased the scale of his works, in which the ever present element of colour acquired greater importance. In 1969 he exhibited at the Galerie Sonnabend in Paris, and the seventies began with his participation in New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 at the MoMA and a substantial presence in Europe, with exhibitions in Eindhoven, Essen, Hanover and London.
During the seventies he developed the architectural implications of his work, a consequence of the complete autonomy that they attained with respect to the space in which they were placed. In 1976 the Kunstmuseum in Basel presented a major exhibition of his drawings. His first major retrospective did not take place until 1979, at Leo Castelli. Colour became the dominant focus in the eighties, when he expanded his palette and the nuances of the colours, introducing a greater lyrical element into his work. In 1986 he inaugurated a permanent exhibition of his work at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa (Texas), a year before his first travelling exhibition in Europe (Eindhoven, Düsseldorf, Paris, Barcelona). In 1998 the Whitney Museum offered the first retrospective of his work organised by a museum.