Untitled

Donald Judd’s four-decade long engagement with wood block printing resulted in a striking corpus of graphic work. In these serialized, hard-edged prints, Judd carried the vocabulary of his Minimalist sculptures–repetition, line, shape, and color—to the medium of print. Judd’s printmaking practice began as a collaborative endeavor with his woodworking father, Roy Judd, who carved the woodblocks for the earliest series. While Judd’s prints of the 1960s and 70s feature monochrome, striped parallelograms or axonometric constructions, Judd shifted his attention to printing variations on a solid rectangular form around 1986. These mature works evince Judd’s interest in framing and dividing the flat surface of the sheet. Richly hued solid forms and uninked voids conform closely to the edges his chosen paper supports. This series from 1990, was Judd’s first use of differently colored blocks together for a single print. While the rectangular form remains central to the woodcut prints, Judd varies this motif with proportional divisions into halves and thirds. The bold colors and rigorous geometry of the prints are modulated only by variations in the wood grain of the printing block or the fine textures of Judd’s preferred papers.