Josef Albers / Donald Judd: Structure & Color

Februcary 19 - May 21, 2005

Both Albers and Judd were dedicated to the central aspects of an artwork: its form, the materials of its structure, and the structure of its color.

A very early example of this is Judd’s Untitled (1963-75), made of wood painted with cadmium red oil paint and purple plexiglas. The sculpture is a square that sits on the floor. It has been bisected and bi-leveled, with the purple plexiglas serving as a line of demarcation, of topography, and of equilibrium to the two halves. In prints such as the untitled cadmium red woodblocks of the 60’s and early 70’s, Judd used the block printing technique to explore the possibilities of serial imagery.
The notion of progression permeated Judd’s career, and a good example of this is the Menziken box series. Starting with a metal rectangle in space, he divided the possibilities inside the form with panels of aluminum and colored plexiglas.

Whereas Judd objected to illusion and the painterly in art, Albers often balanced between two-dimensional physicality and the depth that linear mathematics can inspire. The viewer’s eye bounces between these in prints such as the Multiplex series (1948), and the drafted Ink Drawing For Embossed Linear Construction series (ca.1964). This was carried one step further with the Structural Constellations (1955), where the artist’s lines were actually etched into the plastic medium. The varying degrees of impasto in his paintings allowed Albers to explore both the qualities of pigment and the construction of a painting as a whole. Judd wrote, “Color is a very large matter, and is still insufficiently developed, in thought and art.”

Both artists believed in the immediacy of color, and used unadulterated paint directly from its container. Judd saw color as a tool, allowing his work to be seen purely and distinctly. In the Lascaux series (1989), enameled aluminum and galvanized iron divide the traditional rectangular shape, and color combinations and contrasts serve as a visual buttress to the sculpture. Particularly in the last of his print series, Judd was able to focus on color as singular form. Albers has long been known for his theories on the interactions of color. In the Homage to the Square paintings he used the confines of a repeated structure as the impetus to investigate color’s possibilities. The many shades of one color, and the aspects that make a single color, can be compared through various contrasts. Greys can be greener, blues can be more red, and black can be infinitely subtle.