Untitled
1968

Donald Judd experimented widely with the sculptural format of a floorbox, as in this 1968 untitled work. Fabricated from steel and amber plexiglass, the sculpture displays a complex relationship between open and enclosed volumes. The enclosed volumes are rendered visible by the transparent plexiglass whose amber tint also colors the space around it. Whereas in traditional hollow sculpture we must imagine what fills an interior, in Judd’s work we see what he called “actual space” with a literality and directness that encompasses the inside as well as the exterior. This transparency reflects Judd’s desire for artwork that mitigates the illusionism of represented space. As the artist asserted in 1965: “actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”