Donald Judd, the aura of what does not have it

Madrid,

For Donald Judd, real space is more powerful than flat surfaces and three-dimensional art can relate to it in multiple ways. Understanding them autonomously with respect to their sculptures and specific objectscarried out furniture designs in which he applied the same rigor and developed the same research in terms of shapes and scales as in his purely artistic projects, hence the holistic, elegant results, derived from his personal and rational thinking about space, are to some extent similar.

These are simple and functional pieces that he created to respond to a demand that he considered, in the seventies and eighties, to be unsatisfied: that of quality and affordable furniture that met basic utilitarian needs; These are never more or less ornamental pieces despite their simplicity, but rather tables, desks, chairs or beds, pioneering works with respect to many current designs with the same purposes because they could be transformed according to a multitude of combinations, meeting the demands life changing.

Judd’s role as a furniture designer is well known, but the exquisite taste he maintained as a collector is not so much so: he owned designs by Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, Gerrit Rietveld, Rudolph Schindler and Gustav Stickley, among other authors; iconic pieces that would help him establish his own canon, consisting of pure and rigid lines, cubic shapes, a clearly industrial aesthetic (even with visible screws) and above all, the aforementioned functionality. For this American creator, where there is no concrete usefulness, there is ridiculousness, whether we are referring to a piece of furniture or a building; but he also left room for paradox: these pieces surely please the eyes and mind more than the body, despite the fact that he unequivocally defended the idea that the configuration and scale of art cannot be transposed to this field.

Judd. Drawings, prints, furniture. Elvira González Gallery

A selection of these works (he designed almost a hundred) await us, until the end of January 2025, in what is Judd’s sixth solo exhibition at the Elvira González Gallery in Madrid. They challenge us not to assign labels to them: his understanding of forms and materials, his method of working and also of exhibiting these works do not fit at all with the art practices of his time – he died in 1994 – but neither, obviously, with the processes manufacturing and distribution of common furniture. Derived from his interest in architecture and our ways of inhabiting spaces, he began to make them in pine wood that he acquired in carpentry shops – metal treated with paint for cars would arrive later -, initially for personal use. Upon detecting that, like his sculptures and objects, they could be attractive for mass production, he would begin to develop them on a large scale: in many cases, they continue to be replicated in Switzerland according to his instructions and plans: he did not produce, precisely, in closed series, to accentuate the open and democratic character of the furniture and the loss of its aura as supposedly sacred art.

The pieces that await us in this room, together with drawings and engravings, constitute, in short, the crystallization of the exercise of putting color, geometry and simple lines at the service of usability, without trying to hide the origin or the traces of its components: it will become evident to the viewer that the difference between a seat and a shelf can be the addition or elimination of a shelf, and that it is okay for that to be the case.

His training seemed far from these paths: with a degree in Philosophy and Art History from Columbia University and a painting student at the Art Students League of New York, Judd began his career in the forties as a painter linked to abstract expressionism and pure abstraction. In their five-story Soho home-studio, they would hang works by Dan Flavin, Frank Stella and John Chamberlain; What tells us about his examination of the spaces is the fact that he decided to renovate it several times and also his decision to have his creations exhibited at the Chinati Foundation that, in 1986, he opened in Marfa (Texas): this location allowed him to show works to a large audience. stopover (his own, those of friends and contemporaries) in the desert and in rehabilitated hangars; the conservation of buildings was another of his spatial interests.