Daybed

For Donald Judd the boundaries between art and architecture were in flux from the very beginning.
Donald Judd's creative thinking was truly holistic and his reductivist pursuit of ideal forms and volumes embraced the functional object, the purely sculptural artifact and the architectural scheme. There was no sense of a dividing line between these disciplines, just as there was no distinction in his conceptual approach between the importance of the solid, material structures that he created and the value of the spaces, the voids and the volumes that they helped to define and quantify.
Judd's architecture involved opening up and reconfiguring internal volumes within appropriate existing buildings. Renate Petzinger has described his work with space that "pursues no other objective than to be space which achieves its effect as space-space in a philosophical, epistemological sense" One such project was his late 1980s reworking of the interior of a 1940s building in Eichholteren, near Küssnacht. The present bed, a design conceived within the Eichholteren scheme, was shown in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1988, where it occupied a position on the upper level, breaking a long sweep of open floor and integrating seamlessly with the architecture.

Douglas fir, lacquer finish
44 x 455/8 x 801/4 in.
(111.8 x 115.9 x 203.9 cm)

Provenance:
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Exhibited:
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 1988
Donald Judd Architektur, Osterreichisches Museum, Vienna, 1991
Illustrated:
Osterreichisches Museum, Vienna, Donald Judd Architektur 14.2-8.4, 1991, p. 100
Donald Judd: Räume-Spaces, Stuttgart,1993, p. 137
Barbara Haskell, Donald Judd, New York, 1988, p. 130