Judd was one of the foremost practitioners of Minimal Art and best known for his sleek, boxlike constructions made of industrial materials such as plywood, sheet metal, and plexiglass. Through these works, he sought to create a depersonalized art in which the exploration of space, scale, and materials served as an end, rather than as a metaphor for human experience. Emphatically concerned with formal purity, his works become lucid axioms about proportion and rhythm as much as they are assertions about the displacement of space. Judd's sculptures share rather than invade the observer's space, yet their monumentality often lends them a dynamic presence.

Untitled (1965) is, to use Judd's term, a "progression," and derives in part from his systematic elimination of painting's limitations without a complete rejection of all its physical properties. His reliefs of galvanized metal boxes cantilevered from the wall and given automobile lacquer finishes (here, Harley-Davidson "Hi-Fi Red") express an aesthetic affinity for the detachment of industrial materials and processes. Judd's geometric arrangements eliminate the idea of composition and achieve a singleness of focus on the literal object.