Sol LeWitt, 1998

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 30 July - 29 November 1998. Curator: Nicholas Baume; Exhibition Management: Louise Pether, Susanna Singer.

Sol LeWitt’s work has always been beautiful, even if the conceptualist stance of the sixties played down the sensuous aspects of his art. One need only to look at the prevalence of nineties style minimalism in architecture and design to recognise its compelling aesthetic appeal. The wall pieces of the sixties and seventies, in their articulation of the drawn line, its permutations and combinations, might be ethereal, luminous works, or striking architectural compositions. Examples of such works were made during LeWitt’s first visit to Australia in 1977. He supervised the installation of large-scale drawings at the State galleries in Sydney and Melbourne.

The 1980s and early 1990s saw LeWitt’s wall pieces become increasingly lush in their use of colour and architectural form. Yet these works, with their fresco-like finish, are made through layered washes of black and primary colours (red, yellow, blue), the same essential palette LeWitt used in his earliest works with colour. Even the most complex and colourful ‘fresco’ pieces maintain the aesthetic of ‘flatness’. Geometric forms are rendered in isometric perspective, rather than the illusionistic central-point perspective of the Renaissance. The washes of ink are sponged on so as to permeate the wall surface, building veils of more or less saturated pigment.

In their use of material, imagery and colour, the new wall pieces at the MCA contrast strongly with LeWitt’s previous work. The modernist dictum of flatness is instantly exploded with the bold use of glossy paint. Geometrically derived form is displaced by an eccentrically curvaceous line. The strictly primary palette gives way to stridently clashing primary and secondary colours, on one hand, and on the other to the elegant severity of black on black.

… For all of this LeWitt’s theme-and-variation methodology remains intact. The new aesthetic of these works is just as much a result of LeWitt’s process of elemental reduction and systematic elaboration as anything that has come before. Contrasts of glossy and flat surfaces, and of primary and secondary colours, are potentially as interesting to the abstract artist as any other visual phenomena. LeWitt’s conceptualism allows the look of his art to change radically while retaining its internal logic. Rather than question one signature style exclusively, LeWitt continues to pose new questions.