Donald Judd: Open Enclosed

Perhaps the foremost representative of American Minimalism, Donald Judd (1928-1994) undertook a radical and revolutionary analysis of objects in space with his conflations of architecture, sculpture and painting. Employing steel, wood, aluminum and Plexiglas, Judd refused the nomenclatures of art history, instead describing these works as "specific objects," a term he coined in a 1965 essay of the same name. Judd advocated structures that did not attempt to resemble yet further objects in the world, or aspire to anything beyond their own verifiable limits. "A shape, a volume, color, a surface is something itself," he stated; "it shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole." In Donald Specific , Guillermo Zuaznabar assesses Judd's legendary essay--perhaps the most influential text by an artist made in the past century--and ranges across the entirety of Judd's output to examine the ways in which he applied his conception to actual specific objects.