Yuji Agematsu: 2023–2024

About

One home, 101 Spring Street, is the former living and working space of Donald Judd, where Agematsu worked for more than two decades as a building manager. The second is the Harlem house of Gavin Brown. Spread across both homes are two consecutive years of zips—tiny devotional sculptures Agematsu fashions from detritus that he comes across in New York’s streets and then gardens lightly inside the cellophane sleeve of a cigarette pack.

Three hundred and sixty-six of these zips are displayed on shelves at Judd Foundation, memorializing daily walks taken in succession over the year 2024: one for each day. Another three hundred and sixty-five, from 2023, are on display at Brown’s. Since 1996, Agematsu has made one zip for each day, twenty-eight years of walking and arranging. To this day, he still cannot resist the clarity of the world in the cellophane, all those days, all those walks, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.

2023–2024 is part of Judd Foundation’s ongoing exhibition series in New York. Since 2015, the Foundation has organized exhibitions of works by Rosemarie Castoro, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Irwin, Yayoi Kusama, Richard Long, David Novros, Pierre Paulin, James Rosenquist, Lauretta Vinciarelli, and Meg Webster. These exhibitions continue the historical use of the ground floor of 101 Spring Street as a public exhibition space by Judd.

The exhibition is organized by Judd Foundation in collaboration with Agematsu and designed by Scott Ponik, a long-time collaborator of Agematsu.