Art Division Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition: Color in the prints of Donald Judd and Henri Matisse. The Judd prints and the Matisse Jazz Suite are part of Art Division’s print collection.

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We‘ve brought these two artists together to show how distinct they are from each other and, at the same time, how they share a great deal in common. Judd held Matisse in particular esteem, and appreciated his scale, variety of hues, and repetition of forms. He admired Matisse’s cutouts for their sheer size and scale, as well as for their materiality and brilliant hues. Both Judd and Matisse were concerned with large areas of pure flat color. Judd frequently used cadmium red light throughout his career because he believed red possessed the ideal brightness and value to exert a physical presence.

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Judd believed that color in the work of Matisse provided strong, immediate sensation. This is clear in Judd’s work as well. The pure color of his woodblock prints is the first thing that strikes the viewer. The color exists slightly on top of the thin paper. This foregrounds color and gives it a directness and clarity. This body of work by Donald Judd was created in New York at Pace Editions from 1988 to 1999.

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The Matisse prints were made with the use of stencils. The paint stains the paper, deeply saturating the prints rather than, in Judd’s case, laying atop the surface. Matisse worked with a wide range of colors. Red remained the color that dominated many of his paintings, the most iconic example being, “The Red Studio,” whose background is flooded with Venetian red. In the Jazz images, his use of red is important, but is used sparingly, most notably in the heart of the Icarus figure that seems to radiate light.

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While recovering from a serious operation in 1941, and with limited physical ability, the one medium Matisse could work in was collage made from painted paper. The walls of the room where he was convalescing were covered in brilliant cut-outs. Matisse completed the twenty compositions, based on those collages, for the Jazz portfolio at the end of World War 2.