SAINT LOUIS, MO.- The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts presents the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Donald Judd’s multicolored works. On view from May 10, 2013 to January 4, 2014 and curated by Marianne Stockebrand, the former director of the Chinati Foundation, Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works features an extraordinary group of objects created by Judd between 1984 and 1992 that are characterized by his ever-evolving engagement with the subject of color. The exhibition gathers together works from private and public collections across the United States and Europe, including Italy, Switzerland and Austria. Among the public lenders to the exhibition are the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Although color had been a significant component in Judd’s work from the beginning of his career, until the early 1980s he employed no more than two colors in a single object. By contrast, the body of work Judd began in 1984 shows a multiplicity of hues, of mostly four to eight colors per object, in combinations that are both striking and unexpected. These multicolored works mark the beginning of a new focus in Judd’s oeuvre, which centered on the expression of industrial color in three dimensions.
“It is my intention to create more awareness for this body of work, which embodies Judd’s most comprehensive and complex approach to color,” says curator Marianne Stockebrand. “I am happy that we can present a range of his color interests through a selection of works that are different in size, structure, and color combinations.”
Because Judd’s multicolored works are understudied, his writings continue to offer the greatest insight. In his last essay “Some aspects of color in general and red and black in particular,” written just before his death in the fall of 1993, Judd wrote: “I wanted to use more and diverse bright colors than before… I especially didn’t want the combinations to be harmonious, an old and implicative idea which is easiest to avoid, or to be inharmonious in reaction, which is harder to avoid. I wanted all of the colors to be present at once. I didn’t want them to combine. I wanted a multiplicity all at once that I had not known before.”
Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works is the first time that this “multiplicity” will be given its due attention. The exhibition features two dozen objects, including one very large floor piece (150 x 750 x 165 cm), and wall pieces that range between 60 and 360 cm in length. In addition, there are 30 collages and drawings that document Judd's working process both in regard to color selection and ordering. These materials are all kept in the Judd Foundation’s archive in Marfa, Texas, and have not been exhibited.
Stockebrand specifically selected the featured works for the spaces of the Pulitzer. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando, the building’s clarity of form and plentitude of light provide a meaningful counterpart to Judd’s multicolored works. “The multicolored works require a kind of brightness to underscore their presence in space,” says Stockebrand. “I hope that both art and architecture will enhance each other in this exhibition.”
“I have known and admired Donald Judd's work for a long time, but was unfamiliar with these late multicolored ones,” says Emily Rauh Pulitzer, founder and chairman of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. “Marianne has thoughtfully selected objects that reveal the great complexity and variety of color inherent in these works. I look forward to their presentation in the Pulitzer's Tadao Ando building, where in the past we have undertaken the challenge of showing the work of artists no longer living, such as Dan Flavin and Gordon Matta Clark, whose interests focused on the installation of their work. As often at the Pulitzer, I hope this exhibition will reframe preconceived ideas about an artist's work—in this case, Judd's relationship to color—and will therefore inspire our visitors to think differently about art.”
