MASS MoCa
Sol LeWitt: A Wall
Drawing Retrospective
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, through 2033, occupies nearly an
acre of specially built interior walls that are installed—per LeWitt’s own
specifications—over three stories of a historic mill building situated at the
heart of MASS MoCA’s 19th-century,
former factory campus.
Wall Drawing
1081 - Planes of Color – March 2003
Wall Drawing
1046 – Bars of Color
- May 2002
Sol LeWitt:
A Wall Drawing Retrospective
Sol LeWitt is
widely regarded as one of the leading exponents of Minimalism and Conceptual
Art, and is known primarily for his deceptively
simple geometric structures and architecturally
scaled wall drawings. His experiments with the latter commenced in 1968 and
were considered radical, in part because this new form of drawing was purposely
temporal and often executed not just by LeWitt but also by other artists and
students whom he invited to assist him in the installation of his works.
Wall Drawings
414 - 413
Drawing Series IV (A) - with color
ink washes – March 1984
Sol LeWitt:
A Wall Drawing Retrospective
Each wall drawing begins as a set of
instructions or a simple diagram to be followed in executing the work. As the
exhibition makes clear, these straightforward instructions yield an
astonishing—and stunningly beautiful—variety of work that is at once simple and
highly complex, rigorous, and sensual. The drawings in the exhibition range
from layers of straight lines meticulously drawn in black graphite pencil lead,
to rows of delicately rendered wavy lines in colored pencil; from bold
black-and-white geometric forms, to bright planes in acrylic paint arranged
like the panels of a folding screen; from sensuous drawings created by dozens
of layers of transparent washes, to a tangle of vibratory orange lines on a
green wall, and much more. Forms may appear to be flat, to recede in space, or
to project into the viewer’s space, while others meld to the structure of the
wall itself, like gauze.
Wall Drawing
146A
All two-part combinations of arcs
from corner and sides, and straight, not straight, and broken lines within a
36-inch (90cm) grid.
June 2000
Sol LeWitt –
Structures
A new adjunct to MASS MoCA’s long-running Sol
LeWitt’s Wall Drawing Retrospective; a concise selection of the artists’ three-dimensional sculptures. The works
illustrate the generative potential for LeWitt’s serial approach.
Incomplete
Open Cubes – 8/5 – 3/2 – 8/9
1974 –painted aluminum
Wall Drawing
343D
(Rectangle) – 343E (Trapezoid) – 343F (Parallelogram)
On a black wall, nine geometric
figures (including right triangle, cross X) in squares. The backgrounds are filled in solid white.
December 1980
Wall
Drawings 880 - Loopy Doopy
(orange and green) – September 1998
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective opened to the public, after nearly six months of intensive
drafting and painting by a team comprising twenty-two senior and experienced
assistants who worked with the artist over many years; thirty-three student
interns from Yale University, Williams
College, the Massachusetts College
of Liberal Arts, and fourteen other colleges and universities; and thirteen
local artists and recent graduates and postgraduates from many of the nation’s
leading studio-art programs.
Wall Drawing
386
Stars with three, four, five, six,
seven, eight and nine points, drawn with light tone India ink wash inside, an
India ink wash outside, separated by a 6-inch (15cm) white band - January 1983.
Sol LeWitt -
Structures
Negative Pyramid - 1997
