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Lot Essay
Wild ribbons of lustrous colour twist and thread across Sol LeWitt’s Untitled. LeWitt used the purest ‘elements of simple forms’ to produce his riveting and complex compositions, evident in the present work’s fundamental and essential colours (S. Lewitt interviewed by S. Ostrow, Bomb, vol. 85, October 2003, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/sol-lewitt/). Created in 1996, the painting exhibits a drama and complexity specific to the work of that decade, a transformationwhich coincided with LeWitt’s return to the United States from Italy where he had lived since 1980: ‘I had by this time reached a point in my use of colour that had fulfilled all that was possible. I wanted to do something that was opposite. Instead of subtle, restrained, muted colour, I wanted colour (and form) that was raucous and vulgar’ (S. LeWitt quoted in G. Garrels, ‘Interview with Sol LeWitt’, New Art Examiner, vol. 28, no. 5, December 2000, pp. 13-15).
Widely considered the key founder of both the Minimalist and Conceptual art movements, LeWitt’s practice fundamentally uprooted long-held beliefs as to what constituted an art object. Instead of pursuing a unique image or fully realised output, he focused instead upon questions of process and material. ‘When an artist uses a conceptual form of art,’ LeWitt declared, ‘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... Ideas are discovered by intuition’ (S. LeWitt quoted in Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2000, p. 369). For Lewitt, seriality was a central technique which enabled him to exploit an idea to its fullest, and most complete, potential; he returned to specific structures repeatedly, such as the wavy, flowing lines of the present work. Yet Untitled marks a decisive departure for LeWitt: instead of an almost mechanised reproducibility, the painting shows evidence of the artist’s hand and in the graceful, curving forms he found endless possibility to transform anew.
Widely considered the key founder of both the Minimalist and Conceptual art movements, LeWitt’s practice fundamentally uprooted long-held beliefs as to what constituted an art object. Instead of pursuing a unique image or fully realised output, he focused instead upon questions of process and material. ‘When an artist uses a conceptual form of art,’ LeWitt declared, ‘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... Ideas are discovered by intuition’ (S. LeWitt quoted in Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2000, p. 369). For Lewitt, seriality was a central technique which enabled him to exploit an idea to its fullest, and most complete, potential; he returned to specific structures repeatedly, such as the wavy, flowing lines of the present work. Yet Untitled marks a decisive departure for LeWitt: instead of an almost mechanised reproducibility, the painting shows evidence of the artist’s hand and in the graceful, curving forms he found endless possibility to transform anew.