SOL LEWITT

Sol LeWitt (1928 - 2007) was an iconic American artist whose work helped to establish both Minimalism and Conceptual Art. LeWitt’s practice was based primarily within his own intellect, establishing a rubric of formal instructions which his assistants followed to create the works. Some of the artist’s most integral pieces are his Wall Drawings, in which he explored myriad variations of applying drawn lines onto walls. “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,” he wrote in his seminal 1967 essay Paragraphs on Conceptual Art. During the 1950s, while experimenting with painting during the day and working nights at The Museum of Modern Art, he met the artists Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin and Robert Mangold. By the early 1960s, influenced by a combination of Robert Rauschenberg, Josef Albers and Eadweard Muybridge, LeWitt had developed his uniquely cerebral approach to making art. Over the course of his career he would have a profound influence on both his peers and younger artists including Frank Stella and Eva Hesse. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA); the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (USA); the Tate Gallery in London (UK); the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York (USA) and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (USA).