Sol LeWitt. Wall Drawings from 1968 to 2007

Centre Pompidou-Metz presents the largest retrospective ever shown in Europe of Sol LeWitt wall drawings.

Conceived in close collaboration with the LeWitt Collection (Chester, Connecticut), the exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz features thirty-three black-and-white works spanning the artist's entire career. The retrospective reflects both the extraordinary consistency of LeWitt's systematic explorations and the remarkable diversity of his revolutionary practice.

The American conceptual artist (1928–2007) created some 1200 wall drawings between 1968 and 2007, developing mainly serial and modular systems through a vocabulary of abstract geometric forms. The first wall drawings explore in pencil combinations of straight lines in four directions, a form LeWitt would return to throughout his career. He then progressively introduced numerous variations: not straight lines, broken lines, grids; simple figures: arcs, circles, triangles, etc. and complex figures, loops, pyramids and "forms derived from a cube". From pencil and crayon to India ink, acrylic paint, and graphite, the variety of materials used by LeWitt is equally demonstrated throughout the exhibition.

The making of the wall drawings at Centre Pompidou-Metz has been the occasion of an exceptional collaboration with professional drafters trained by the LeWitt studio, local artists, and more than 60 students from local art and architecture schools.

Curator: Béatrice Gross, New York

Exhibition Design: Cécile Degos, Paris

Sol LeWitt. Colors June 21 to October 14, 2012 In partnership with the Centre Pompidou-Metz, M-Museum in Leuven (Belgium) presents a chromatic counterpart to the retrospective in black and white, which features over twenty wall drawings in color. Curators: Eva Wittocx (Chief-Curator, M-Museum) and Béatrice Gross (Independent curator, New York) www.mleuven.be.

MONO June 1 to September 2, 2012 Sol LeWitt. Wall Drawings from 1968 to 2007 is also part of a cross-boarder initiative entitled MONO. Simultaneously presenting solo shows by contemporary artists, MONO unites fifteen modern and contemporary art venues in Luxembourg, Lorraine (France) and Saarland (Germany).

Sol Le Witt
Wall Drawings from 1968 to 2007
Kuratorin: Beatrice Gross