COLLECTION | Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt (°1928 - +2007, US) was one of the most important minimal and conceptual artists. He was one of the founders of the radical, rationally-oriented aesthetic that was deployed as a reaction to the emotionally-oriented American Expressionism of the 1950s and 1960s. In Minimal Art, the form of the artworks is reduced to the extreme. Conceptual Art went one step further by making the concept or underlying idea of an artwork more important than its beauty or physical form. A major element of both movements is that the artist, as a maker of art, fades into the background. In 1968, LeWitt began creating his ‘wall drawings’: monumental, usually geometric wall drawings that were produced following clear and strict instructions, no longer by the artist but by his assistants. In 1976, S.M.A.K. purchased one of Sol LeWitt's wall drawings: ‘Wall Drawing No.39 / Intersecting Bands of four Colors (Black – Blue – Red – Yellow) from four Directions – 90 cm wide (symmetrically)’ (1976). This piece will be executed on a large scale for the first time since the museum's opening in 1999. It is also the beginning of a presentation-in-progress on the Minimal Art and Conceptual Art from the S.M.A.K. collection and for a number of performances that take the wall drawing as their starting point. In this way, transient forms of exhibition and art will enter into varied relationships with Sol LeWitt’s monumental work, the only constant in this presentation, which is itself also temporary.