David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of prints by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Fred Sandback. While predominantly known for their threedimensional works, drawing and printmaking were valued techniques that each of these artists engaged with throughout their careers. The mechanical and collaborative components inherent to the process of printmaking had clear correlations to their shared Minimal aesthetic, and it proved to be an additional medium for these artists to express their understanding of space and material. Executed between 1961 and 1994, the selection of prints on view will offer additional insight into each of the artist’s unique sculptural practices, attitudes, and concerns.
For Dan Flavin, who was himself a scholar and collector of fine and rare prints, printmaking was an integral part of his practice, and he was drawn towards the creative experimentation that it afforded. The prints in this exhibition demonstrate the same rigorous attention to color and composition as his fluorescent light installations. On view is a rare set of prints from 1994. These deeply colored cylindrically-shaped aquatints, made on round handmade paper that is curled and stitched together, have a unique sculptural presence that, like his work in fluorescent lights, experiments with color in three-dimensions.
Donald Judd utilized woodcut printmaking in the beginning of his career, and this exhibition will feature rare experimental single-sheet works from 1961. Made before the sculptural forms that he is best known for, these prints relate more closely to Judd's early practice as a painter and are made using cadmium red oil paint. Also on view are the artist's later prints from the 1980s and 90s–which depict a series of rectangular sheets of paper that are identical in size but vary by proportional divisions–including two sets of ten woodcuts from 1988, one in cadmium red and one in ivory black. Judd's prints reflect the same formal and serial concerns found in the artist's three-dimensional works.
Beginning in the 1970s, Fred Sandback created a prodigious body of lithographs, woodcuts, and etchings that make use of the conventions of print media to explore the range of spatial concerns expressed in his sculptures and related drawings. On view will be a selection of prints, including Untitled (from Four Variations of Two Diagonal Lines), 1976, that investigate the graphic forms and thematic subjects conveyed in Sandback's sculptural works, which outline planes and volumes in space by employing wire, yarn, and elastic cord.