The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosts “Donald Judd: Specific Furniture”, an exhibition that aims to uncover the logic that underpins the American artist’s designs. The narration of his visual logic is assigned to his own pieces and his design collection, along with photographs of the spaces he lived in, where the previous two coexisted. Sitting, touching and contemplating: the visitors are invited to experience the artist’s pieces before and after the exhibition.
San Francisco. The uncompromising integrity of Donald Judd
The furniture designed by the American artist is on show at SFMOMA along with the photographs of the spaces he lived in.
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- Giulia Ricci
- 26 September 2018
- San Francisco
“Donald Judd: Specific Furniture”, installation view, SFMOMA, San Francisco, USA, 2018. Photo Matthew Millman
“Donald Judd: Specific Furniture”, installation view, SFMOMA, San Francisco, USA, 2018. Photo Katherine Du Tiel
“Donald Judd: Specific Furniture”, installation view, SFMOMA, San Francisco, USA, 2018. Photo Matthew Millman
“Donald Judd: Specific Furniture”, installation view, SFMOMA, San Francisco, USA, 2018. Photo Katherine Du Tiel
“Donald Judd: Specific Furniture”, installation view, SFMOMA, San Francisco, USA, 2018. Photo Matthew Millman
“Donald Judd: Specific Furniture”, installation view, SFMOMA, San Francisco, USA, 2018. Photo Katherine Du Tiel
Donald Judd, Armchair, designed 1984, fabricated 1998
Architecture studio, Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas. Copyright Judd Foundation. Photo Matthew Millman
4th Floor, 101 Spring Street, Judd Foundation, New York. Copyright Judd Foundation. Photo Matthew Millman
5th Floor, 101 Spring Street, Judd Foundation, New York. Copyright Judd Foundation. Photo Matthew Millman
Library, 3rd Floor, 101 Spring Street, Judd Foundation, New York. Copyright Judd Foundation. Photo Matthew Millman
Architecture Office, Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas. Copyright Judd Foundation. Photo Matthew Millman
Donald Judd, drawing for a birch plywood standing writing desk, 27 August 1990. Copyright Judd Foundation
Donald Judd, drawing for a birch plywood standing writing desk, 27 August 1990. Copyright Judd Foundation
In “Donald Judd: Specific Furniture”, the artist’s work intensely dialogues with pieces coming from his own collection – such as Alvar Aalto’s stool 60 (1932-33), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s MR Side Chair (1927) and the Red Blue Chair by Gerrit Rietveld – intended as pieces for both use and contemplation. These pieces were arranged into compositions set in the places he lived and worked in, notably in his New York home at 101 Spring Street, SoHo, and his residence in Marfa, West Texas, now the venues of the Judd Foundation.
Taught in art and philosophy at Columbia University, Judd (1928-1994) saw art and furniture design as contiguous practices; his work in these fields share a common visual logic, based on a study on proportion and materials. Nevertheless, the specificity of the disciplines was clear in the artist’s mind as, in his words, “Art and goods are divided by the frontier of function; to think of a commodity as a work of art – or vice versa, a work of art adapted as a commodity – means to create an ugly work of art and an ugly object”. The understanding of the specificity of the disciplines he engaged is structural in his work and emerges even more clearly in the spatial configuration of Marfa’s domestic and working spaces, where each building dispersed in the ranch land serves a specific function: an art studio, an architecture studio, a writing office, a library, and several large-scale sculptural installations. The integrity of Judd’s work on furniture design consists in the liberation from ornament and to a conceptual reduction to the unavoidable dialogue between function, form and material, where “form need not necessarily follow function, but it must not violate it.” Notes: both quotes from the text by Emanuela Frattini Magnusson, In New York, At Eichholteren, from Domus 759, April 1994.
- Donald Judd: Specific Furniture
- 14 July – 4 November 2018
- SFMOMA – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
- 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California 94103, USA