Sol LeWitt

UNTITLED, 2001

• Sol LeWitt (°1928, USA)
• gouache
• 152.4 x 172.7cm

‘The recent gouaches that I’ve been doing stem from some of the early wall drawings, using not-straight pencil lines. I’ve always made drawings and, later, gouaches simultaneously with the wall drawings. The wall drawings more and more began to be done by other people. As with the wall pieces, the gouaches have had their own organic development, I try to make them as part of the ritual of my life. I’ve found large paper, five feet wide, that allows me to make larger work. The ideas in the gouaches do not run parallel with those of the wall drawings. They are quite different and follow their own logic. The wall drawings have ideas that can be transmitted to others to realize. Only I can do the gouaches.’ – Sol LeWitt

American artist and theorist Sol LeWitt was a key figure associated with the Conceptual and Minimalist art movements of the 1960s and '70s. Redefining the widespread understanding of what constituted an artwork, LeWitt explored these ideas through a wide range of different disciplines and mediums, including works on paper.

Executed in 2001, towards the end of the artist’s career, Untitled is a beautiful example of the culmination LeWitt’s artistic ventures into the medium of gouache on paper. Since the 1990s his style had become more free-flowing and expressive, lending itself well to the colourful gouache; created with his own hands, the dynamic, rippling lines in the present work – reminiscent of the surface of water – rendered in deep, verdant green, obfuscating the black ground, are twisting and fluid, in a departure from his earlier rigid geometric compositions.

LeWitt’s works can be found in numerous public collections around the world including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centre National d’Art Moderne Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Tate Gallery, London.