Donald Judd (1928-1994) is greatly recognized as a sculptor. Before his famous three-dimensional works, his exploration of printmaking began a decade earlier. While attending The Art Students League in New York from 1948 to 1953, he created his first prints in 1951. Over the next forty years, Judd pursued an intense investigation into “form” and “color” through the medium of prints, just as he did with his paintings and three-dimensional works.
　In the early 1950s, Judd’s monochromatic lithographs often depicted figurative themes, such as scenes from rooms and riverbank landscapes. He then shifted to woodcut prints as his primary medium in 1953. Throughout the mid-1950s to 1961, his works evolved from representational to abstract, geometric forms. From 1961 to the mid-1980s, Judd’s prints were characterized by a limited color palette of black, red, and blue, with parallelograms dominating the shapes.
In 1986, Judd’s focus moved from parallelograms to rectangles. He began experimenting with the “color reversals” (where one sheet featured a color in the center, and another placed the same color along the edges) and divided the print’s composition usinghorizontal and vertical lines (fig. 1). By the 1990s, as his works became increasingly complex, the color palette expanded, and the use of “reversals” and lines grew more intricate (fig. 1). The destination of his printmaking oeuvre is Untitled (Schellmann-Jitta 298 - 301), which is being exhibited this time.
　This set of prints, the final works documented in the catalogue raisonné Donald Judd: Prints and Works in Editions, reveals a new and unprecedented approach in Judd’s practice. They depart from the color “reversal” technique seen in earlier prints from 1961 onward and introduce a new approach where colors frame an untouched central area of Japanese paper, a first for Judd. Additionally, this set is the only example in which Judd experimented with oil paint stripes on the glass of each galvanized iron frame (fig. 2). It serves as a culmination of his research and offers a glimpse into a new direction in his art.

* See
Jörg Schellmann and Mariette Josephus Jitta (eds.), Donald Judd: Prints and Works in Editions, Munich and New York. Edition Schellmann, 2nd revised and updated edition, 1996.