“Color and three-dimensional space are one.”

—Donald Judd

Instantly recognizable as a quintessential Donald Judd creation, Untitled, 1988 challenges traditional art historical conventions and appears, at moments, to defy gravity itself. This striking stainless steel and blue Plexiglas stack exemplifies Judd’s groundbreaking approach to form and space, offering a clear expression of his philosophy that art should be understood as real, physical objects—non-illusionistic, self-contained, and grounded in material truth. An important example of his iconic multi-part stack sculptures—many of which reside in major museum collections—the present work demonstrates Judd’s belief that form, color, and material should exist in direct dialogue with their environment, creating space rather than depicting it.

Untitled boasts a distinguished provenance. It is being offered on the market for the first time since its acquisition from the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1989—within a year of its execution. A pioneering figure in the promotion of Minimalist art, Cooper was one of Judd’s earliest and most dedicated supporters. In a recent interview with T Magazine, she shared a photograph of her Chelsea home in which a Judd stack is installed in her living room, seamlessly integrated into a domestic setting among functional furniture and everyday objects.ⁱ This anecdote underscores the democratic ethos of Judd’s work—meant to coexist with life, not be isolated from it—and highlights the enduring relevance of his vision for art that is grounded in clarity, structure, and presence. 

Judd coined the term “specific objects” in his seminal 1965 essay of the same name, describing works that reject the inherited constraints of painting and sculpture in favor of a new, autonomous visual language. This work encapsulates that vision: its serial repetition and industrial materials reflect Judd’s desire to remove any trace of the artist’s hand, foregrounding structure, proportion, and the relationship between object and viewer.

 “There is no neutral space, since space is made.”

—Donald Judd

Towering up the wall over a ten-foot expanse are ten rectilinear boxes spaced apart from each other in even intervals, purposefully installed in such a way that the gap between the units equals their volume. From a purely frontal view, the boxes appear afloat mid-air, lacking a pedestal to support them, unlike traditional sculptures for which the platform is often taken for granted. Though an absence, the space between the floor and bottommost box is still an integral part of the work, calculated to take just as much space as the absences between the units, beginning the rhythmic oscillation between positive and negative space, which notably ends with another absence. The individual gaps, units, floor, ceiling, and wall all present themselves as one whole, inviting the viewer into a new space defined by their integration. Liberating the traditional art historical notion of the “figure” outside the confines of a tangible presence, the work blurs the subject/object dynamic by turning the viewer into the “figure,” as Flavin Judd writes in discussing his father’s work: “The figure on the field was abandoned and we became the figure, architecture became the field.”ⁱⁱ

Untitled reflects—and quite literally reflects—Judd’s decades-long commitment, first initiated in 1965 with the creation of his earliest stack, to allowing materials to speak for themselves in a direct and practical manner. He began realizing this vision as early as 1963, shifting away from his earlier wood constructions to explore the formal possibilities of thin sheet metal. From that point on, Judd continually refined the design of his multi-part stacks, maintaining the rectilinear form of his boxes while experimenting with a range of industrial metals—including galvanized iron, brass, copper, aluminum, and stainless steel—to better understand how their distinct properties shaped visual and spatial perception.

Judd viewed himself as an empiricist, one who trusted in observation and experience to guide creative innovation. “Making art requires a deep knowledge of your field, like science does,” he asserted in a 1991 interview, just a few years before his death.ⁱⁱⁱ This approach is evident in the present work, where the artist’s deep material sensitivity results in a compelling interplay: the hard-edged, industrial solidity of stainless steel is set in dialogue with the luminous, semi-transparent surface of blue Plexiglas—a contrast that evokes both precision and permeability, clarity and ethereality. Through such juxtapositions, Judd expanded the aesthetic possibilities of minimalist form, demonstrating that even the most restrained materials could convey a sense of visual tension and poetic resonance.

In choosing Plexiglas, Judd could also make color a defining aspect of his work, while uniting the elements of color, material, and space and presenting them as one whole medium. In Untitled, the reflected tint of blue inherent in the resin shimmers down the tower of stacks, revealing a continuous column, reminiscent of an ethereal foundation of light, that softens the brutalist geometry of the stainless-steel units. In establishing space through the color blue, as enabled by the material of acrylic, Untitled epitomizes Judd’s dedication to making what he believes to be the three “main aspects of visual art” – “material, space, and color” – equal yet inseparable players in his work.^iv Simply by existing in plain sight, the work lets its fundamental properties perform their tricks without the need to impress through trompe l’oeil or other illusionistic devices. Importantly, Judd draws the distinction between illusion and illusionism, the former of which he describes as the type of optical illusion that is “objective and real,” unlike the latter which is artificially induced and created.^v For Judd, the phenomenon of optical illusion was enough to intrigue the eye.

“Things that exist exist, and everything is on their side.”

—Donald Judd

Making the viewer feel as though they are right there, conscious of the space that it is and creates, Untitled reveals itself as a lyrical blend of opposites that come together as one whole. Solid and ethereal, opaque and translucent, open and closed, the work calls to mind a “kind of cerebral music that plays inside and outside of the stack forms.”^vi A hallmark of post-war American art, the present work betrays the artist’s dedication to the study of materials and his adamant faith in the properties of materials alone. Space, color, and material are integrated as one whole and, in their integration, create a new sculptural language that elevates the stack into a sublime presence.  

ⁱ “My Life in Pictures: Paula Cooper,” T Magazine, October 11, 2016, online.  
ⁱⁱ Flavin Judd, “Space Regained,” Donald Judd Stacks, New York, 2013, p. 7.
ⁱⁱⁱ Donald Judd, quoted in “‘Donald Judd: Artist,’ Interview with Fietta Jarque for El Pais,” May 22,
1991, in Donald Judd Interviews, New York, 2019, pp. 769-70.
^iv Donald Judd, Some Aspects of Color, 1993, online.
^v Richard Shiff, “Donald Judd Fast Thinking,” Donald Judd Late Work, New York, 2000, pp. 8-9.
^vi Judd Tully, “Donald Judd: Shape, Structure & Stacks,” Donald Judd Stacks, New York, 2013, p. 15.