Judd hated the word minimalism as a description
for his work and the work of other artists
who he regarded as peers or colleagues and
this piece in a sense destroys anyone’s
conception that minimalism is about very
simple forms in single materials with no
colour, no sensuousness and so on. By the
mid-80s Judd was really beginning to fire
on all cylinders in terms of wanting to explore
not just the materials but also colour in
its full range of possibilities, and he found
himself in Switzerland, noticed that there
was a process being applied there to put
colour onto metal material, I mean literally
office furniture, and adapted this process
for his own use. So he had a series of aluminium
panels coated with enamel paint and then
he progressively organised them, in very
very simple ways, I mean the piece behind
me with sections that are 30cm and 60cm combined
in simple combinations, taking a very limited
range of colours but then permuting them
through both the front surface, the bottom,
the top, giving this sense of colour permeating
the whole object, but then combining to produce
very unexpected effects.
When we think about the history of sculpture,
of course there are moments of polychrome,
whether it’s in the medieval period or indeed in the late 19th century. But 20th century sculpture is always regarded as monochromatic, I mean whether it’s in bronze or whether it’s later in steel, generally speaking colour is not a feature of 20th century sculpture. Of course there are exceptions, one thinks of Tony Caro’s painted steel pieces, but Judd is a painter and he brings a painter’s sensibility to the use of colour in sculpture, and I think that’s
one of his great contributions to the development
of sculpture in the period. So we see here
an artist who has used colour in his painting,
then in a certain sense used colour through
the combination of different materials which
are self-coloured, and then finally rather
like Mondrian, in his last years bursting
into an exploration of all the chromatic
possibilities and combinations.
