SOL LEWITT
Hartford, Connecticut, USA, 1928 – New York, USA. 2007

Wall Drawing #499
Flat-topped pyramid with color ink washes superimposed
Color ink wash

Sol LeWitt’s thoughts and work have been enormously influential and continue to inspire many younger artists and thinkers. His writings of reference on Conceptual Art make him an important proponent of this new approach to artmaking. Dissociating the idea from the process of making the work of art, he very early on relied upon others to fabricate his structures or execute his wall drawings, as would an architect with construction companies, or a composer with musicians.

LeWitt started producing Wall Drawings in 1968 and continued until his death, in 2007. A conceptual form of artwork, Wall Drawings were elaborated as a set of instructions meant to be executed by anyone including the artist. Those works therefore exist in a dematerialized form until they are produced directly onto the wall of the exhibition space. Unlike other art forms, their materialized form – in this case, color ink applied in layers onto the wall – is not meant to last: they be erased and re-executed onto another wall. Thus, his work stays very much alive and always subject to new interpretations, as is a musical score: each drawing is scaled to fit the space it will occupy, and new hands come to execute the instructions of the artist, keeping the work as fresh as when it was first presented. The color scheme is based on four colors: yellow, red, blue and black; all the geometric forms are in fact derived from a single line inclined in a different direction – vertical, horizontal, or oblique.