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24/4/2005

Sol LeWitt on the Roof

Metropolitan Museum of Art - MET, New York

Splotches, Whirls and Twirls

Five sculptures and one wall-drawing by the celebrated American artist Sol LeWitt (born 1928) will go on view in The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden of The Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 26, 2005. A prolific artist since his emergence in the mid-1960s, LeWitt will show recent painted fiberglass sculptures, Splotches, as well as a unique wall-drawing created for the Roof Garden’s eastern wall. The works will be exhibited in the 10,000-square-foot open-air space that offers spectacular views of Central Park and the New York City skyline. The installation will mark the eighth single-artist installation on the Cantor Roof Garden.

The installation is made possible by a grant from Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky.

On view will be: the 12-foot-tall Splotch #15, 2004 (fabricated 2005); the 12-foot-long Splotch #3, 2000; and three vertical 6 ½ -foot-tall works – Splotch #5, 2002, Splotch #7, 2002, and Splotch #8, 2002. The 32-foot-long Wall Drawing #1152 Whirls and Twirls, 2005, painted in acrylic, employs the three primary colors – red, yellow, and blue – and the three secondary colors – green, orange, and purple – and echoes the abstract forms and vivid colors of three of the Splotches.

Over the 50 or so years of his artistic career, LeWitt has worked as a painter, as a creator of large two-dimensional works he terms wall drawings, as a creator of three-dimensional works (these he prefers to call structures rather than sculptures), and as a practitioner of various graphic arts: gouaches, prints, posters, books, and book design. He is most esteemed for his emphasis on the originating idea behind a work of art. In 1967 he wrote: “No matter what form [the work] may finally have, it must begin with an idea.” The execution or realization of the idea could be and was assigned by LeWitt to other workers, a practice he continues.

In a shift away from his well-known geometric vocabulary of forms—for example, the many variations of white, open, modular structures based on the cube, such as the Incomplete Open Cubes of the early 1970s – the Splotches and Wall Drawing #1152 Whirls and Twirls on the Roof Garden this summer indicate vividly the artist’s growing interest in somewhat random curvilinear shapes and highly saturated colors.

In the late 1990s, LeWitt moved from making large gouaches in rather subdued colors and wall drawings in subdued ink washes to using bright acrylic colors. He used bright acrylic paints on a group of free-form fiberglass objects of 1999. These he called Non-Geometric Forms, as if to announce that he wanted to change radically “to something not geometrical.” The Splotches, in turn, grew from these 1999 forms.

LeWitt has been collaborating for six years with sculpture fabricator Yoshitsugu Nakama to translate his two-dimensional, hand-drawn designs – which present the works from a bird’s-eye view, drawings LeWitt terms “footprints” – into three-dimensional forms. LeWitt makes two versions of each structure, one that indicates different color divisions of the works and the other indicating the heights of the colored sections. LeWitt’s designs are scanned into Nakama’s computer and refined with a succession of software programs, including one that enables the artist and fabricator to see an illusion of the structure in three-dimensional form. Nakama then slices the image of the three-dimensional structure at two-inch intervals. These “slices” are printed and pasted onto slices of construction foam and then stacked and glued on top of one another. This rough structure is then carved and smoothed using rasps and sandpaper. Epoxy resin and fiberglass are applied to reinforce the foam, and the structure is made smoother with more layers of epoxy compound. Paint is applied using two or three coats of primers, three or four coats of colors, and six to eight coats of varnish.

Since 1968, LeWitt has made more than 1,000 wall drawings. Wall Drawing #1152 Whirls and Twirls was designed to complement the five Splotches. It has been executed in the same acrylic colors by a team of four painters, who worked on the Roof Garden for about four weeks – Takeshi Arita, Sarah Heinemann, Gabriel Hurier, and Chie Shimizu. When the exhibition is over, this version of the wall drawing will be destroyed.

LeWitt was born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised nearby in New Britain. As a child, he took art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. He lives and works in the countryside in the south-central part of the state, near the Connecticut River, and sometimes he visits an apartment in lower Manhattan and a house in Umbria in central Italy. LeWitt majored in studio art at Syracuse University, served in the U.S. Army in Japan and Korea, and in 1953 moved to New York City, where he worked for some years as a graphic designer, a field that still interests him. In 1960 he began to concentrate on his own creative practice, at the same time taking jobs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a night receptionist and at the Book Sales Desk. There he worked alongside other artist-employees such as Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, and Robert Ryman, as well as the critic Lucy Lippard. He soon became a leader of the generation of artists who rejected the gestural painting of the Abstract Expressionists for art that bridged Minimal and Conceptual Art.

* * *
From May 1 through December 31, 2005, two dramatic concrete-block structures by LeWitt – Circle with Columns and Curved Wall with Columns – will be on view at Madison Square Park, between 23rd and 26th streets. The installation is organized by the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

Press preview: Monday, April 25, 10:00 a.m. - noon

Exhibition location: The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden

The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden opened to the public in 1987. Annual installations have featured selections of modern sculpture from the Metropolitan Museum's collection and, most recently, presentations of works by the artists Ellsworth Kelly (1998), Magdalena Abakanowicz (1999), David Smith (2000), Joel Shapiro (2001), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (2002), Roy Lichtenstein (2003), and Andy Goldsworthy (2004).

The Cantor Roof Garden will open to the public this year from April 26 through October 30, as weather permits. Sandwiches and beverage service – including espresso, cappuccino, iced tea, soft drinks, wine, and beer – are available at the Roof Garden daily from 10:00 a.m. until closing.

Metropolitan Museum
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