Sol LeWitt, 1977

Wall drawing in Sydney: All two part combination of arcs from four corners and four sides, straight not-straight and broken lines in four directions.
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, drawn 14-22 March, on display until July.

Wall drawing in Melbourne: Lines to points on a grid. On yellow: Lines from the centre of the wall. On red: Lines from four sides. On blue: Lines from four corners. On black: Lines from four sides, four corners and the center of the wall.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, March-April.

LeWitt arrived in Australia a decade after his influential 'Paragraphs on conceptual art' had christened the new tendency in art (Artforum, June 1967). During and interview with the Sydney Morning Herald's Jill Sykes (18 March 1977) LeWitt recalled how he and his colleagues had initially rejected the label 'minimal art', 'because it just meant how the art looked and not what it was. But conceptual art came to incorporate all kinds of forms of art in the late sixties, early seventies. Not only was it the very precise and logical art that it described in the beginning. It also included performance and everything under the sun that wasn't anything else'.
…LeWitt's Art project involved installing wall drawings, a new genre in drawing that has been developing since 1968. Examples - drawn by assistants - had been first seen in Australia in 1974 in 'Some recent American art', a major exhibition touring under the auspices of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The wall drawing chosen for Sydney dealt with the theme of arcs and lines. 'All two part combinations of arcs...' had already been installed many times since it was conceived in 1972, differing each time depending on the shape and size of the wall. The site for the drawing was the double height wall joining the Gallery's old and new wings. Scaffolding was erected so that LeWitt and his assistants (students from the Alexander Mackie College) could complete the colossal floor-to-ceiling work. In Melbourne LeWitt installed a completely different wall drawing titled, 'Lines to points on a grid...'1977.