Installation view with Dan Flavin, the nominal three (to William of Ockham) (1963)
Artwork © 2016 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Installation view
Artwork, left to right: © 2016 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, © 2016 Estate of Walter De Maria
Installation view
Artwork, left to right: © 2016 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, © 2016 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Installation view with Donald Judd, Untitled (88-28 A/B) (1984)
Artwork © 2016 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Installation view
Artwork © 2016 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Installation view
Artwork © 2016 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Gagosian Hong Kong is pleased to present 間 (jiān), a group exhibition of Minimalist works selected in response to Dan Flavin’s the nominal three (to William of Ockham) (1963).
“間” is a composite of the Chinese characters for “sun” and “door,” evoking a sliver of light between two pillars. It can be translated as “interval,” “gap,” “space,” or “pause.” This image-moment taps into the phenomenological aims of Minimalism, which uses simplified forms to communicate the primacy of intellect and bodily awareness over artistic content.
Emerging from de Stijl, Constructivism, and Suprematism, as well as American mass production, Minimal art locates the content of an artwork in the viewer, rather than in the object. Artists such as Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Walter De Maria, all included in this exhibition, pursued a pure objecthood informed by existentialist philosophy and theories of being and nonbeing.
In the early 1960s, Flavin’s interest in elementary forms and industrial materials led him to develop site-specific arrangements of commercial fluorescent lights. Circumventing the limits of the gallery, he used the standard lengths of the tube lights to set up nonhierarchical interrelationships, blurring distinctions between the aesthetics of art and industry. the nominal three (to William of Ockham) (1963) is made up of six identical lights, three subsets positioned in a numeric sequence across a single wall. Displayed as parallel vertical beacons, the lights can be read from left to right: one light, then two, then three, exemplifying Flavin’s calculated awareness of the empirical realities of rooms.
From their respective fields, three international cultural figures—artist and designer Ronan Bouroullec, fashion visionary Michèle Lamy, and chef and restaurateur Enrique Olvera—reflect on Donald Judd’s work in furniture, the subject of recent exhibitions in South Korea and Japan.
Join exhibition curator Donna De Salvo as she discusses her selection of the artist’s rarely seen sculptures, drawings, films, and archival materials in Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience at Gagosian, Le Bourget. Chief among these is Truck Trilogy (2011–17), De Maria’s final sculpture and the centerpiece of the exhibition.
In this video, Flavin Judd, the artist’s son and artistic director of Judd Foundation, discusses a historic large-scale work by his father from 1970, ahead of its presentation at Art Basel Unlimited 2024.
The Winter 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Anna Weyant’s Two Eileens (2022) on its cover.
The definitive monograph on the work of Walter De Maria was published earlier this fall. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Elizabeth Childress and Michael Childress of the Walter De Maria Archive talk to Gagosian senior director Kara Vander Weg about the origins of the publication and the revelations brought to light in its creation.
The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.
In this second installment of a two-part essay, Julian Rose continues his exploration of Donald Judd’s engagement with architecture. Here, he examines the artist’s proposals for projects in Bregenz, Austria, and in Basel, arguing that Judd’s approach to shaping space provides a model for contemporary architectural production.
Richard Shiff speaks with Caitlin Murray, director of archives and programs at Judd Foundation, about the archive of Donald Judd, how to approach materials that occupy the gray area between document and art, and some of the considerations unique to stewarding an archive housed within and adjacent to spaces conceived by the artist.
Julian Rose explores the question: what does it mean for an artist to make architecture? Delving into the archives of Donald Judd, he examines three architectural projects by the artist. Here, in the first installment of a two-part essay, he begins with an invitation in Bregenz, Austria, in the early 1990s, before turning to an earlier project, in Marfa, Texas, begun in 1979.
Art historian Eileen Costello and Yale School of Art professor Marta Kuzma discuss Donald Judd’s two-dimensional work and how the lessons he learned from the innovations of Abstract Expressionist and Color Field paintings permeate his entire body of work. Their conversation is moderated by Caitlin Murray, director of archives and programs at Judd Foundation.
Peter Ballantine, Donald Judd’s longtime fabricator of plywood works, and Martha Buskirk, professor of art history and criticism at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, discuss the development, production, and history of the largest plywood construction Judd ever made, an untitled work from 1980.
In this second installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield resumes his investigation of Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), focusing this time on how the hope to see lightning there has led to the work’s association with the Romantic conception of the sublime.
In the first of a two-part feature, John Elderfield recounts his experiences at The Lightning Field (1977), Walter De Maria’s legendary installation in New Mexico. Elderfield considers how this work requires our constantly finding and losing a sense of symmetry and order in shifting perceptions of space, scale, and distance, as the light changes throughout the day.
The Spring 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Gerhard Richter’s Helen (1963) on its cover.
In this video, Flavin Judd, the artist’s son and artistic director of Judd Foundation, leads a walkthrough of the exhibition Donald Judd: Artwork: 1980 at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York. Flavin connects the work to the concurrent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the permanent installations in Marfa, Texas, highlighting how it fits within Judd’s oeuvre.
Flavin Judd, the artist’s son and artistic director of Judd Foundation, speaks with Kara Vander Weg about the recent installation of the sculptor’s eighty-foot-long plywood work from 1980 at Gagosian, New York.
The inaugural presentation of Frieze Sculpture New York at Rockefeller Center opened on April 25, 2019. Before the opening, Brett Littman, the director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum and the curator of this exhibition, told Wyatt Allgeier about his vision for the project and detailed the artworks included.
Lars Nittve investigates Truck Trilogy, Walter De Maria’s last work, conceived in 2011 and premiered at Dia:Beacon in 2017.
Artist Terry Winters, longtime friend of De Maria and member of the installation crew for The Lightning Field, recounts a trip to New Mexico and the surrounding area and attests to the power—the “rhythm and pulse of ancient mystery”—that continues to imbue De Maria’s artworks into the present day.
