For New Yorkers, the artist Mr Donald Judd has long been a neighbourhood fixture. His former home at 101 Spring Street in SoHo has, since his death in 1994, been maintained as it was when he lived there. It is permanently installed not just with his own pared-back sculptural works and furniture, but with those of like-minded artists such as Messrs Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain. The experience of art within space was an important part of Mr Judd’s artistic ideology. It’s why he set up further permanent installations in the remote Texan town of Marfa, which has become a bit of a contemporary art outpost. But it’s not the whole story, which is why it’s exciting that, this March, New Yorkers are being treated to a full retrospective of Mr Judd’s work, the first of its kind in 30 years, at the Museum of Modern Art.

MoMA’s Judd exhibition, which opens on 1 March, features more than 70 pieces from the influential sculptor, and chronicles his career from the early 1960s onwards. Visitors will be able to trace how his work evolved from early prints and paintings to the rigorously simple three-dimensional sculptures, often featuring progressions of steel boxes, for which he is best known today.

Much here will be familiar to fans of Mr Judd’s work, but the final room, in which pieces from his last 10 years are displayed, will be less so. At this point, he was not only fabricating his works in Europe, but exploring a world of exuberant colour that will perhaps surprise those who associate him with austerity and minimalism, a term the artist himself hated. The exhibition will also be a chance for those with a critical bent to reacquaint themselves with Mr Judd’s excellent writings via a specially designed reading room, replete with its own set of Mr Judd-designed furniture.

Judd is at MoMA, New York, from 1 March to 9 January 2021