Sol LeWitt. Drawings 1958-1992

Sol LeWitt (Hartford, Connecticut, 1928) belongs to that generation of painters who shook the 1960s art scene with a new aesthetic proposal known as minimalist art. But LeWitt actually plays a more important role in the history of conceptual art. His interest in the conceptual stages that precede the physical act of artistic creation and his refusal to emphasize its final effect have made a decisive contribution to the discourse on art.

Minimalism embraces the movements in modern art that aim to reduce painting and sculpture to the essence of geometric abstraction. Minimalist art eliminated figurative images and illusionistic pictorial space and replaced them with a single image, often composed of smaller segments organized in a grid pattern. Despite their tendency towards mathematically regular compositions, minimalistic works are extremely varied, ranging from the evocation of the sublime that is inherent in the monochromatic canvases of Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman to the rigorous essays on geometry produced by Robert Mangold and Brice Marden.

At the end of the sixties, with the evolution of its leading minimalists and the arrival of a new generation of artists who regarded minimalism as the final step in avant-garde art, the art world opened up to new concepts. which were to a great extent characterized by heterogeneity and synthesis.

Sol LeWitt’s style and theory evolved out of minimalism and he became one of the pioneers of a new artistic trend called conceptual art. In response to the most simplificative elements of minimal art he published Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (1967) and Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969) in which he attempted to give his new work a theoretical foundation, which it still maintains.

«In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most import aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless.»

LeWitt describes the execution of a work of art as a process that is carried out mechanically, blindly. This means that the artist’s plan must be summarized in an explicit code that can be easily deciphered regardless of whether the work is executed by the artist or by someone else. LeWitt’s relationship to art is like a designer’s relationship to his drawings. The artist experiments with his drawings, creates hypotheses and then turns them over to a mathematician friend, his collaborators or a printer. The artist is the center of a hub of activity, inventing tasks for others to perform, producing objects and ideas to be weighed by others.

This dichotomy between conception and execution is the essence of LeWitt’s work. And, contrary to the first impression his seriate exercises might cause, chance, freedom and pleasure are evident in both stages of creation.

The over 400 drawings and watercolors exhibited at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies give viewers an opportunity to discover a universe of systems with its structured codes and divisions. This is one of the least known facets of LeWitt’s work: small paintings created in the privacy of his studio, works that are crucial to an understanding of his production and, by extension, his evolution.

Sol LeWitt has personally set up this exhibition and designed the catalogue, both of which are based on an original idea by Franz W. Kaiser, exhibitions curator at the Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.

The exhibition is a chronological overview of LeWitt’s production, ranging from his earliest drawings, which date back to the 1950s and are effective sketches or studies of geometric forms, to the repetitive systems of modular cubes through which he attempts to reduce subjective expressivity to the bare minimum. It also includes line drawings, which he translates into extremely precise words so that there is not a shadow of a doubt as to the length, the direction and the distance of the lines to be executed. The exhibition concludes with a sample of his most recent works: compositions consisting of bands of colored ink, which have now replaced the lines and curves that he has gradually abandoned.

No matter what art form he uses, LeWitt always starts by making preliminary studies that capture his concept and are a prelude to the possible execution of his works. This panoramic exhibition displays the full scope of the drawings produced by LeWitt during more than thirty years of intense activity.