Galvanized Iron 17 January 1973

This work by Donald Judd, acquired by the museum in 1979, is a characteristic example of Minimalist art. In the 1960s and 1970s artists pushed their quest for a pure and abstract art form to the extreme. They believed that a form, colour or surface should refer to nothing other than itself. Judd made Minimalist three-dimensional forms from which every form of personal expression is excluded. , ‘I wanted work that didn’t involve incredible assumptions about everything. I couldn’t begin to think about the order of the universe, or the nature of American society. I didn’t want work that was general or universal in the usual sense. I didn’t want to claim too much. Obviously the means and the structure couldn’t be separate and couldn’t even be thought of as two things joined. Neither word means anything’. ‘A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself. It shouldn’t be concealed as part of a fairly different whole. The shapes and materials shouldn’t be altered by their context. One or four boxes in a row, any single thing or such a series, is local order, just an arrangement, barely order at all. The series is mine, someone’s, and clearly not some larger order. It has nothing to do with either order or disorder in general. Both are matters of fact. The series of four or six doesn’t change the galvanized iron or steel or whatever the boxes are made of.’ Donald Judd, 1968