The exhibition presents 34 works on paper – gouaches, drawings, watercolors – and three projects for the famous Wall Drawings by the American artist Sol LeWitt, one of the founding fathers of conceptual art.
His works first of all solicit the mind of the observer rather than his eye or his emotions and are defined as conceptual to the extent that it is the idea that presides over the execution of the work.
Drawing and mural painting are the two poles around which the artist's production has developed since 1968. It is in this period that LeWitt argues that the idea is the fundamental component of his art, placing the execution and the object as children. It is in fact significant that the realization of the Wall Drawings is left to his assistants, and the final result is presented together with the executive project, displayed alongside the mural to help the observer understand the basic idea and the consequent complexity of development.
"From an expressive point of view - says Gianluca Ranzi in the text in the catalog - what interests LeWitt is mainly given by the fact that not only the thought must preside over and surpass the importance of the realization, but that the latter must embody the thought making it manifest to the viewer".
“To make this concept understood – continues Gianluca Ranzi – LeWitt resorted to the example of music: music, as we hear it, is the final result, while the notes that produce it exist only to be read by those who can understand and use them, that is, the musicians who perform the piece of music indicated on the score. The public, on the other hand, will listen to the music that arises from the performance but will be unaware of the minimum units that govern it, as well as of the modalities of their harmonic relationship with each other”.
The works in the exhibition actually reconstruct the creative evolution of LeWitt, from some examples of that rigorous and schematic multiplication of a basic cube (Cube Without a Cube, 1982, pencil on paper, 56×56 cm) or a rectangle (Folded Paper, 1971, folded paper, 15×30 cm) which reveal in black and white the principle of his well-known modular grid sculptures, up to the large figures of irregular geometric solids which also in the abstract and mathematical use of color are linked to Piero della Francesca's painting (Geometric Figure, 1997, gouache on paper, 152,9×173 cm), ending with many significant examples of the famous wavy or tangled colored lines that form the basis of important public interventions such as those for the American Embassy at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin or for the Naples Metro.
LeWitt sun was born in 1928 in Hartford (Connecticut, USA) into a family of Russian Jews. After high school, in 1949, he graduated from Syracuse University with a BA in Art. In 1953 he moved to New York, where he attended a well-known school for illustrators and later worked as a graphic designer with the Chinese-American architect IM Pei.
After working for a few years in illustrated art publishing, he began teaching at important art schools, became a collaborator at the MoMa in New York and towards the end of the XNUMXs he taught at New York University and at the School of Visual Arts.
The first part of his artistic production in the 1967s is Minimalist in style, centered on the geometric figure of the cube which the artist considers to be "lacking in aggressiveness, the basis for every more complex function", therefore the perfect module to be able to develop an infinite plot of possibilities and combinations. In XNUMX, after having participated in the exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York, he drew up the manifesto "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" in which he declared that the artist's task was to formulate only the project, while the implementation of the work was a minor activity that can be delegated to others. In the XNUMXs, the artist began to create Wall Drawings, painted walls made up of geometric modules arranged next to each other to develop a design capable of changing or adapting based on the structure that houses them.
The eighties, on the other hand, are characterized by the so-called Modular Structures and Complex Forms, which demonstrate the close link between drawing and three-dimensional forms and their nature as tools for measuring the environment.
Sol LeWitt's works have been exhibited in the most prestigious museums, public and private spaces in the world, such as the MOMA in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Kunsthalle in Bern, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Geementemuseum in The Hague , the Kunsthalle in Bern, the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, as well as Documenta 4 and Documenta 5, the Venice Biennale and the Minimal Art I Review at the Musèe d'Art Contemporain in Bordeaux. In 2000 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art dedicated one of the most important and complete retrospectives to him, subsequently hosted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Milan, May 2016
