Donald Judd: Furniture Donald Judd's furniture arrives in South Korea for the first time

By Ali Morris

Between 1970 and 1990, Donald Judd increasingly shifted his focus from autonomous art objects to the spaces of everyday life. It was a period of experimentation that gave rise to furniture in wood, metal and plywood, that demonstrated a functional yet deeply philosophical approach to domestic objects – 'furniture must possess usability and utility,' he once said. For Judd, furniture was never secondary to his sculptural work. Instead, it formed part of a continuous investigation into proportion, structure and the way bodies move through space.

Now on view at Itaewon gallery, Hyundai Card Storage, in Seoul, the Judd Foundation presents Donald Judd: Furniture, an exhibition that brings together thirty-eight of the American artist’s designs realised during this time. Curated by Flavin Judd, artistic director of Judd Foundation and the late artist's son, the presentation includes furniture, drawings, and prints from Judd Foundation collections as well as designs specially fabricated by Donald Judd Furniture for the occasion. It also marks the first time Judd’s furniture has been the subject of a dedicated exhibition in South Korea.

The exhibition, which follows on from the 2020 Judd retrospective at MoMA – also sponsored by Hyundai Card, is organised into four spaces informed by the artist’s own working and living environments and his thinking on space, colour and material, and the layout is. It's an approach that Flavin Judd hopes will help visitors to experience the works not as isolated artefacts, but as elements within a larger spatial system. This architectural framing offers insight into the practical and philosophical conditions under which the furniture was conceived, while opening up questions about how Judd imagined these objects being used, inhabited and encountered.