Sol Lewitt dealt with art as a teenager under expert guidance. He studied art from 1945 and worked among artists from various specialist areas for several years. In his third decade of life, he started teaching art. Of course, he always did an active art during this whole time.
When he can be seen at his first solo exhibitions in the mid -1960s, an artist comes to the public. This has actively and passively learned art and created art around three decades.
Lewitt is considered apioneer of both the minimal and concept art. Inspired by the successive photographs of animals and people on the move, whichEadweard Muybridge made, Lewitt integrated seriality into his works in order to indicate the course of time or a narrative sequence. Two significant essays by Lewitt:"Paragraphs on Conceptual Art"(1967) and"Sentences on Conceptual Art"(1969) were particularly formative for this new art direction. The first text says:
The idea becomes a machine that makes art. "
He left a well -developed work that could be seen in the exhibitions now listed below. The art lovers who look at this work quickly notice that. The posthumous success of sol lewitts continues to increase unstoppable.
Sol Lewitt - early years and artistic training
Sol Lewitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1928. As a child, he took part in art courses in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. In 1949 he acquired his BFA degree at Syracuse University and then did his job in the US Army during the Korean War, stationed in Korea and Japan.
In 1953 Lewitt moved to New York, where he visited courses at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and at the same time performed production work for the Seventees magazine. From 1955 to 1956 he worked in the graphic design office of the architect in Pei.
He worked with exact, well -considered formats such as grids and modules and systematically developed different variations. His approach was often mathematically shaped, determined by language or was created by random procedures. He also implemented similar principles during his paper work. Lewitt presented his first solo exhibition in 1965 in the John Daniels Gallery in New York.
Structures, soon with human proportions
"White Cubes" by Sol Lewitt, 1991 in Frankfurt/Main by Laurenatclemson (CC by 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons
In the early 1960s, Lewitt earned his livelihood as a night receptionist in the Museum of Modern Art. There he met the future art critic Lucy Lippard and the artists Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. At that time, Sol Lewitt began “structures” as he used to name his three -dimensional work.
He used the open modular structure of the cubes, a form that has fascinated his thinking since the time, to which he first felt like an artist. After a first series of work closed, shaped wooden objects that were painted thickly by hand, he decided in the mid -1960s to "completely remove the skin and reveal the structure."
This skeletal shape, radically simplified open cubes , became a basic building block of his three -dimensional work. These open cubes always contained the same twelve linear elements that were connected to the skeletal structure at eight corners.
In the second half of the 1960s, his art was increasingly shown in group exhibitions, which were soon summarized under the term minimalism; This also included the exhibition “Primary Structures” in the Jewish Museum of New York in 1966. During this time, he taught at various educational institutions in New York, including at New York University and the School of Visual Arts.
From 1969 he created many of his modular structures on a larger scale. They were produced in aluminum or steel by industrial processors. Each of its large open cubes was 63 inches, which corresponds to the equivalent. At this stage, Lewitt began to generally transfer the proportions of the human body to its fundamental sculpture units.
From the mid -1980s, Lewitt then put together some of his sculptures from stacked concrete stones. As with the previous "structures", he created variations of a limitation that he is imposed.
Sol de Witt's "Circle with Towers" in the Madison Square Park Fotov by Acegas @ flickr.com, Artwork by Sol de Witt (flickr.com/photos/acevedo/23872048/) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Nlewitt began to work with concrete blocks. In 1985 the first "Cube" in a park in Basel (today in the Zellweger Park, Uster, Kanton Zurich), Lewitt designed multiple variations of a tower from 1990, which was to be built from concrete blocks.
Lewitt developed a growing interest in random shapes with curvy lines and in highly saturated colors in a turning point from his well-known geometric shape vocabulary.
This interest culminated until the time of his death in April 2007 in the design of a concrete sculpture with 9 towers, which consists of almost 4,000 white concrete blocks and has a total height of 5 meters. Sol Lewitt's “9 Towers” has been in the Kivik Art Center in Lilla Stenshuvud, Simrishamn, Sweden since 2014.
Wall Drawings - wall paintings
In 1968, Lewitt began mural paintings , to draw simple diagrams directly onto the wall First works in graphite, then colored pencils, colored pencils, ink, acrylic paint and other things were used.
Because Lewitt made one of these "Wall Drawings" in 1968 for the opening exhibition of the Paula Cooper Gallery, which the "Student Mobilization Committee to End The War in Vietnam" supported, these Wall Drawings appeared a little later a thousand times duplicate everywhere on surfaces of walls.
"Wall Drawing 831 (Geometric Forms)", by Sol Lewitt, Museo Guggenheim (Bilbao, Spain) Photo by Zareman [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
From 1969 to 1970 Lewitt created four "Drawings Series" , which show the basic elements of the first works in various combinations. In each series, he made another system to put together the twenty -four possible combinations of a square divided into four equal parts.
The "Drawings Series I" system called Lewitt "Rotation" , in "Drawings Series II he used the " Mirror " ," Drawings Series III "used " Cross & Reverse Mirror " and" Drawings Series IV "the " Cross Reverse " .
These systems and Lewitt continued to develop, from the bright "Wall Drawing #122" (1972) to the dark "Wall Drawing #792" (1995), from pencil and chalk to a lively ink, whose commitment of Lewitt at his study of the frescoes Giotto, Masaccios and other formerly Florentine painters in his Italian period (late 1970s) attributed.
Towards the end of the 1990s/early 2000s, Lewitt had arrived at highly saturated colorful acrylic wall drawings , the shapes curved, playful and almost accidentally appeared, but which were created according to a demanding system. The ligaments that run the image, for example, had to have exactly the same width, no colored section was allowed to touch another section in the same color.
In 2005, Lewitt began with a series of 'Skribble' Wall Drawings , Torture Wall Painting, which was given this name because he only described outlines here that later had to be filled with graphite in painstaking little work by "scribbling".
In precisely prescribed density, six times graduated, which gives a unique impression of three -dimensionality. The six-week meditation course in the Tibetan monastery, with confidentiality, is an exciting event compared to a few weeks of “scribbling”.
On albrightknox.org you can watch people from the Sol Lewitt area "scribble" - in 2010, they are creating the work of art designed by Lewitt in 2006.
This largest dribbled mural, "Wall Drawing #1268" still hangs in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in New York, the absolutely stunning effect can be guessed when looking at the small illustration.
The completion of the work of art by others is not a unegated to the artist, but is one of the principles of Lewitt's work, which become Wall Drawings and should normally be carried out by other people and not artists themselves.
Sol Lewitt writes the control unit of concept art
The above has already been indicated that the initially classified artist Sol Lewitt as a minimalist is called the "father of concept art" because he invented this term.
It can be stated a little more precisely that Sol Lewitt moved in the middle of the many artists who invented concept art together-a new style in art lies in the air as long as a new behavior trend in a society in a society (e.g. the trend to be observed from the uncritical "I-Bin-Doch-Nnicht-Blöd" consumption to the stupid consumption of consumption).
Sol Lewitt personally shaped the term "conceptual art" and thus immediately presented the theoretical conductor of the new art direction : The "paragraphs on conceptual art" described the concept art fully, as art in which the idea of the work of art is in the foreground, the concept defines art.
And this idea also includes that a work of art is completed by other people and not by the artist himself, one of the central principles in its “paragraphs on conceptual art” .
Colored logic: Sol Lewitt's Gouaches
In the 1980s, after his time in Italy, Sol Lewitt began painting with gouache. Using the semi -transparent, water -based color, freely flowing abstract works in contrast colors.
Atypical for the idea of concept art, he painted these works of art with his own hands, often in series that circled around a certain motif.
No motif in the figurative sense, the series deal with "irregular forms" (irregular forms), "parallel curves" (parallel curves), "squiggly brushstrokes" (ornate brush strokes) and "web-like grids" (network-like grid).
At first glance, these gouaches, who appear in their loosely thrown compositions like a tremendous break with Lewitt previous work, are at second glance the exact logical continuation of his work.
Its "irregular forms” are in their irregularity of an almost constricting regularity (seeartnet.de). His "parallel curves" give the human brain the logic of an organically grown structure.
The "squiggly Brushstrokes" subconsciously commemorate the slightly crumpled fur of the animal adapted to a special environment, which is known to be developed in the course of a long evolution even after a very sensible order.
In his “web-like grids” you could see the ingenious foresight of an organic development of this website, which has not yet existed at the time of the creation of the works of art: from the blurred, self-organizing surface to absolute compression, the information in the black space.
So again art with a logical structure. It would be exciting to find out whether Sol Lewitt is revered by artistically interested mathematicians to a similar degree as Johann Sebastian Bach from musically interested mathematicians.
Since Sol Lewitt began with his art, various sciences have discovered genius principles behind organic structures - exactly behind such organic structures that material -loving people think of when looking at Sol Lewitt's work. Sol Lewitt has researched the simple and ingenious logic of such structures less strictly scientifically than was intuitive in his art ...
Artist books
Sol Lewitt's interest in the seriality of art has produced over 50 artist books since 1966, the last in 2002.
In 1976 he founded Lucy Lippard and other "Printed Matter" , an organization that is still existing today, supported and distributed by "Artist's Books" , Printedmatter.org .
Architecture and landscape architecture
Sol Lewitt worked with the architect Stephen Lloyd to design a synagogue for the "Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek" community in Chester, Connecticut, which he belonged to.
An "airy" (airy) synagogue construction was created, with a flat dome, which is worn by a lush wooden roof chair, a homage of Lewitts to the wooden synagogue buildings usual in Eastern Europe and extraordinarily beautiful, pictures on www.cbsrz.org .
In 1981, Lewitt was invited by the Fair Lount Park Art Association (today Association for Public Art ) to design a public work of art for FAIrTOUNT PARK. He designed the "Lines in Four Directions in Flowers" with over 7,000 plants that should be planted in a precisely specified ornamental structure. The artwork was planted in 2011, here it can be viewed in a small slideshow: www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/770.html .
Lewitt as an art collector
Lewitt and his wife Carol have put together an impressive collection of well over eight -thousand works of art since the 1960s, which includes works by its predecessors and contemporaries. They showed themselves as a generous lender for numerous facilities, whereby the WadSworth Atheneum is particularly noteworthy.
Significant hiking exhibitions with retrospectives from Lewitt were organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1978 and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s, Lewitt Chester made his main residence in Connecticut.
He died on April 8, 2007 in New York.
Exhibition history - Sol Lewitt as a world artist
A summary of the life and work of an exceptional artist is of course a look at the exhibition history.
In 2015, the exceptional artist Sol Lewitt or his work has completed half a century of exhibition history300 solo exhibitions and well over 500 group exhibitions .
That is why it is about the world with Sol Lewitt, across Ddiese and through more randomly selected exhibition locations. This cross -section with one or two outstanding exhibitions per year in various centers in contemporary art illustrates much more impressive than any longer list. Sol Lewitt was and is at home in the centers of modern art, all over the world.
Solo exhibitions
1965 John Daniels Gallery, New York, USA
1969 Sol Lewitt: Sculptures and Wall Drawings, Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany
1970 Gemeentemuseum, the Hague, the Netherlands, first retrospective
1972 Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland
1973 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England
1974 Inclete Open Cubes and Wall Drawings, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburg, Scotland; With a subsequent tour of further locations 1974-1977
1975 Wall Drawings, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
1996 Thinking Print: Books to Billboards 1980 - 1995, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
1996 Sculpture Projects, Münster, Germany
1996 XLVII Esposizione Internazional d'Arte, La Biennale di Venezia, Italy
1997 Sculpture Projects, Münster, Germany
1997 XLVII Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte, La Biennale di Venezia, Italy
1998 SESC, New Delhi, India
1998 Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold: Prints, Galerie Franck + Schulte, Berlin, Germany
1999 Galeria Ibeu, Copacabana, Brazil
2000 Artisti Collezionisti, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy
2001 Art Works: The Marzona Collection Art Around 1968, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany
2002 Conceptual Art: 1965-1975 from Dutch and Belgian Collections, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
2003 The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA
2004 Traces: Body and Idea in Contemporary Art, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan
2005 Collection Lambert En Avignon, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Avignon, France
2006 Ideal City - Invisible Cities, to Exhibition by European Art Projects, Zamosc, Poland and Potsdam, Germany
2007 Dump: Postmodern Sculpture in the Dissolved Field, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway
2007 Words from the Collection of Societe Generale Paris, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania
2007 Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
2008 Exact + Different: Art and Mathematics from Dürer to Sol Lewitt, Museum Modern Art Foundation Ludwig Vienna, Austria
2009 Don't Think. Feel! Gallery Yamaguchi, Kunst-Bau, Tokyo, Japan
2009 American Printmaking Since 1960, Art Gallery Dubrovnik, Croatia
2010 On-Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
2011 Conceptual Tendencies 1960S to Today, Daimler Art Collection, Potsdammer Platz Berlin, Germany
2012 en subjective historia 1966-2011, Galerie Aronowitsch, Stockholm, Sweden
2013 Conceptual Tendencies 1960S to Today II: Body/Space/Volume, Daimler Art Collection, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin, Germany
2014 Melting Walls, Works from the Igal Ahouvi Art Collection, Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel
2015 America is hard to see, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
The above list of the exhibition venues Sol Lewitt's exhibition venues, despite or precisely because of the randomly made selection, forms an astonishingly precise look at the world centers of art and that art has something to do with democracy ...
Sol Lewitt's art can be visited in public space in many places in the world, in Germany and closeness z. B. the "Cube" (1984) in Zellweger Park in Uster near Zurich, the "Black Form-Dedicated to the Missing Jews" (1987) in Hamburg-Altona, the "Open Cubes" (1991) in the Gallus facility in Frankfurt am Main, the "Three Triangles" (1993/94) at the north end of the Teerhof Peninsula in Bremen, "without title" (2006/2007) in the Mercatorhalle in Duisburg, "Wall Drawing" in the United States message in Berlin.
Three Triangles von Sol Lewitt (1994) Photo by Verograph (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons
You can find more Sol Lewitt in Europe in many public collections , including the most important museum collections of contemporary art :
Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia;
Center Georges Pompidou, Paris;
Dia: Beacon, New York;
EVN Collection, Maria Enzersdorf, Austria;
Dia: Beacon, Guggenheim Museum, New York;
Halls for New Art, Schaffhausen, Switzerland;
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC;
Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich;
Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Naples.
Museum of Modern Art, New York;
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC;
National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade;
Tate Modern, London;
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven;
In the United States there are some permanent “Wall Drawings” to find in/at the Axa Center, New York; Atlanta City Hall, Atlanta; Akron Art Museum, Akron; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Columbus Circle Subway Station, New York; Conrad Hotel, New York; Green Center for Physics at, Cambridge; Jewish Community Center, New York; The Jewish Museum of New York, New York; John Pearson's House, Oberlin, Ohio; United States Courthouse in Springfield, Massachusetts; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.
Where can you buy art from Sol Lewitt?
In order to acquire art of this exceptional artist, the following contact points are particularly recommended:
With the world greats of art, the question always arises how they made the rise to this top position. Sol Lewitt is a pleasant example of how such a climb is possible, without dark powers of almost satanic talent, without the grubby forces of the promotion of unamifiarities through influential relatives/acquaintances, without the radiant energy of a special happiness and without the help of only chance; Simply with simple work .
From the beginning, Sol Lewitt worked on his art within a consistently pursued and sustainably carried out career strategy. Until his death in 1980, Lewitt implemented one creative idea after another.
In order to get a good impression of the diversity of his art, you only have to enter "Sol Lewitt" in a picture search engine or can browse a little directly on the following pin board:
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Sol Lewitt is undisputed one of the most important artists of his time when they want to put it in money: in 2014 "Wavy Brushstroke" (1995, Gouache on cardboard) over Sotheby's, New York .
Sol Lewitt has left a lot with his art and the thought structure, which is behind his idea of concept art: he changed the relationship between the idea and the art product - and it is a change in the direction of more democracy if everyone can make art.
It says that the artist is not on a base of admiration, but that everyone can do art, can and should think art - a way towards more creativity and more freedom of thoughts.
Incidentally, at a mini-knew show by Sol Lewitt's works on a picture search engine, a special consequence of the logic that Lewitt always included when creating his art is striking: Sol Lewitt's works of art have a high degree of aesthetics , nothing is wanted, provocative, eye-disruptive, and many of his works are perceived as beautiful by many people.
In this sense, this applies: "It must always be concept art" perhaps for some work of art in Auguststrasse in Berlin, but in the eyes of most people never for the concept art of Sol Lewitt.
Concept art is an artistic style was shaped Sol Lewitt in the 1960s
The origins of concept art are in minimalism (English: minimal art), and with it the theories and tendencies of abstract painting further developed.
What is special about this style is the fact that the execution of the work of art is of minor importance and does not have to be carried out by the artist himself. The focus is on the concept and idea that are considered equivalent to artistic work.
In this section of the art blog you will find numerous contributions and content on this topic complex as well as representatives, exhibitions and trends.
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