Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

Donald Judd’s dominant form of printmaking as early as 1953, the woodcut allowed the artist to explore form and color in much the same way as his painting, sculpture, and furniture. Judd first began working in prints in 1951 after studying printmaking techniques at the Art Students League, and quickly shifted from figurative lithographs to woodcuts that steadily became more minimal and abstract. After 1961, Judd would only produce prints in series, thus expanding his investigation of repetition, seriality, and permutation. 

“Perhaps Judd’s affection for prints has to do with the making of prints as the result of the making of an object,” wrote Mariette Josephus Jitta, “a wooden block in which actual lines and shapes are cut out...and looking at the impression of such an object on a sheet of paper. It is an object with its own precision, its own denseness and colour, transferred to a piece of paper with a different texture, silk like or shiny, transparent or matte, and with its own colour. It also happens that such a woodblock becomes an independent object after the process of the printing.”