Judd | Marfa Donald Judd exhibition at The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
To me, it’s not the middle of nowhere; as I said, it’s the center of the world, and it’s basically because I like the land and I like to be here.
– Donald Judd, interview with Hans Keller for the television program Roerend Goed, Summer 1993
This place is primarily for the installation of art, necessarily for whatever architecture of my own that can be included in an existing situation, for work, and altogether for my idea of living. As I said, the main purpose of the place in Marfa is the serious and permanent installation of art.
– Donald Judd "Marfa, Texas,” 1985
Donald Judd (1928‒1994), known as a leading artist of the twentieth century, left New York in the 1970s and moved to Marfa, Texas, near Mexico. There he repurposed buildings for living and working, and established the Chinati Foundation for the permanent installation of his work and that of other artists such as Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, and Ilya Kabakov. Each of the spaces Judd pursued in this way has now, after half a century, remain as Judd intended in Marfa.
In addition to a selection of Judd's early paintings from the 1950s and the three-dimensional works from the 1960s through the 1990s, this exhibition introduces his spaces in Marfa through drawings, plans, videos, and materials. The works and materials presented in this exhibition allow visitors to discover Judd's strong conviction about the integrity of visual art and its installation, of which he wrote “cannot be reduced to performance.”
The exhibition also features a section documenting the 1978 exhibition, The Sculpture of Donald Judd (February 22–March 22, 1978), organized by WATARI-UM founder Shizuko Watari.
