Sol LeWitt in Memoriam at MCA Chicago

Written by Cody Clowers Wednesday, 19 January 2011 23:39

CHICAGO, IL - The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, presents Sol LeWitt in Memoriam, on view through August 5, 2007.  In memory of the artist Sol LeWitt, the MCA is presenting a special exhibition of his work that includes a sequence from One-, Two-, Three-, and Four-Part Combinations of Vertical, Horizontal, and Diagonal Left and Right Bands of Color (1993-94), which represents his more recent, colorful style, and a selection of lithographs from Suite of 16 in Color (1971) that shows a progression of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal marks in black, yellow, blue, and red which represents his more spare style of the 1970s.  The exhibition includes photographic documentation of LeWitt tracing his long history with the MCA, including major exhibitions in 1979 and 2000, along with a selection of his artists' books.

One of the most influential American artists of the 20th century, LeWitt was a pioneer of conceptual art.  "No matter what form [art] may finally have it must begin with an idea," he wrote in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967, "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 method was realized in his famous wall drawings which were created by others using a simple set of instructions.  LeWitt was also a seminal figure in the area of artists' books, producing a number of books and co-founding Printed Matter which publishes and distributes artists' books.

Art Sol LeWitt was born in Connecticut in 1928.  He received a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949.  Later, LeWitt moved to New York City where he studied at the School of Visual Arts.  He worked as a graphic designer at Seventeen Magazine and in the offices of architect I.M. Pei, before beginning work in the bookshop of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960.  At MoMA, his co-workers included artists such as Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin and Robert Mangold. LeWitt began exhibiting in New York in the early 1960s and since then has had many exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Holland; the Kunsthalle, Berne, Switzerland; the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, the Netherlands; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

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