Donald Judd (Excelsior Springs, 1928 – New York, 1994) is widely regarded as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His radical ideas and innovative works continue to influence not only the world of art but also architecture and design.

Judd served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War from 1946 to 1947. After returning home, he studied art history and philosophy at Columbia University while also taking painting classes at the Art Students League. In 1948, he briefly transferred to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Between 1959 and 1965, Judd worked primarily as both a painter and an art critic. In the early 1960s, he began to experiment with three-dimensional forms, challenging conventional ideas about artistic expression, empirical knowledge, and the role of the artist in society. This experimentation led him to adopt industrial materials such as steel, concrete, and plywood, and to use fabrication processes to create large-scale minimalist sculptures. Often box-shaped and based on repetition and simple geometric forms, these works came to define a new artistic language.

Judd held his first solo exhibition in 1957 at the Panoramas Gallery in New York. In 1963, his second solo show took place at the Green Gallery. Then, in 1966, he began a long and important collaboration with the Leo Castelli Gallery, which hosted a series of his solo exhibitions.

Around this time, Judd also began teaching. From 1962 to 1964, he taught at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. In 1966, he served as a visiting artist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and in 1967 he was appointed professor of sculpture at Yale University in New Haven.

Judd’s vision of permanently installed art began to take shape in 1968, when he acquired a five-story cast-iron building at 101 Spring Street in New York City. A decade later, he moved to Marfa, Texas, where he continued to create and permanently install his own work as well as that of other artists. These installations, which included studios, living spaces, and ranches, reflected the diversity of his lifelong artistic practice. In 1977, he founded the Judd Foundation, dedicated to preserving his art, spaces, libraries, and archives.

For more than four decades, Judd exhibited extensively across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Major exhibitions of his work were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1968, 1988); the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1975); the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1970), with subsequent venues in Düsseldorf, Paris, Barcelona, and Turin; the Tate Modern, London (2004); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020). He also participated in key group exhibitions, such as the Guggenheim International Award (1971), the Venice Biennale (1980), and Documenta in Kassel (1982). Throughout his career, Judd published numerous theoretical texts that played a major role in shaping and defending the principles of Minimalism.

As mentioned earlier, Judd’s career began with more traditional artistic media—drawings and paintings of landscapes and figures. His early paintings featured blocks of color and shapes inspired by observed scenes and objects. Gradually, he moved away from figurative art, embracing abstraction and using shapes over color fields. In the early 1960s, Judd began integrating physical objects into his paintings to increase their “objectivity,” moving beyond the limitations of the two-dimensional canvas. This shift led naturally to the creation of reliefs, and eventually to fully three-dimensional forms.

In 1962, Judd presented his first freestanding sculpture—made of wood, masonite, and asphalt—quickly followed by a second work combining wood and metal. The following year, he created ten large works, eight of which were featured in his solo show at the Green Gallery. Three of these were wall-mounted, while five were installed directly on the floor. Judd discussed these groundbreaking works in his influential 1965 essay, Specific Objects, where he argued that they did not fit neatly into the categories of painting or sculpture. Instead, they represented something entirely new—a hybrid form that helped redefine contemporary art.

Judd’s approach was shaped by a wide range of influences, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, and Claes Oldenburg. Through careful study and synthesis of these influences, he developed a style that was uniquely his own and laid the groundwork for what would become known as Minimalism.