Project Space: Donald Judd

When Donald Judd very reluctantly abandoned painting in 1961-62 in favor of working in three dimensions, it was because he had finally concluded that a philosophically tenable painting was not possible – philosophically in the empirical-perceptual sense of being entirely available visually, and tenable in the sense of being free of abstraction or any other kind of representation. He called these 'illusionism' because they are all, in the strictest sense, contrary-to-fact, and therefore anti-visual.