Bottrop Piece

Prominent American artist Donald Judd is commonly associated with minimalism because of the reduced formal language he used in his art. He often favored industrial materials when creating works in the areas of architecture, design, painting, and sculpture. He wanted these art forms to be more closely linked, which is how he also approached his own home, work, and exhibition buildings in Marfa, Texas. In this respect, his thinking was closely connected to German Bauhaus. This was further demonstrated by a 1977 exhibition at the Bottrop Museum “Quadrat” in memory of Josef Albers, who had died the year before. The sculpture that remains in Bottrop today was donated from that exhibition.
The basic elements of this work are a disc and ring made of corten steel with a rusty patina. The disc is positioned within the ring to form a diagonal from the top edge to the bottom of the ring. This sculpture is of one of the artist’s few circular works, as he largely prefers right angles. Another example is his sculpture at Aasee, which is comprised of two nested concrete rings and was created for the 1977 Skulptur Projekte in Münster. Material, form, clarity, and organization are the main themes of this work.