Sol Lewitt

Minimalist and exponent of Conceptual Art, born in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. He studied at Syracuse University in 1949, and emerged as an abstract artist in the early 1960s. In the 1970s he made Minimalist ‘structures’, but was already declaring that the concept was more important than the work, and the planning more than the execution, hence his exhibited wall-drawings were afterwards obliterated.

Sol LeWitt (born 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut) is an artist linked to various movements including conceptual art and minimalism.

He has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide since 1965.

Sol LeWitt’s frequent use of open, modular structures originate from the cube, a form that has influenced the artist’s thinking since he first became an artist. Sol LeWitt: Structures includes early Wall Structures and three Serial Projects from the 1960s;

After receiving a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949, Sol LeWitt traveled to Europe where he was exposed to Old Master painting. Sol LeWitt moved to New York City in the 1950s and studied at the School of Visual Arts while also pursuing his interest in design at Seventeen magazine, where he did paste-ups, mechanicals, and photostats. These experiences, combined with an entry-level job he took in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art, would influence LeWitt an artist.

At the MoMA, LeWitt’s co-workers included fellow artists Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, and Robert Mangold. Interviewed in 1993 about those years Lewitt remarked, “I decided I would make color or form recede and proceed in a three-dimensional way.”

The Museum of Modern Art, New York gave Sol LeWitt his first retrospective in 1978-79. Other major exhibitions since include Sol LeWitt Drawings 1958-1992, which was organized by the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Netherlands in 1992 which traveled over the next three years to museums in the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the United States; and in 1996, the Museum of Modern Art, New York mounted a traveling survey exhibition: Sol LeWitt Prints: 1970-1995. In recent years the artist has been the subject of exhibitions at P.S. The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover (Twenty-Five Years of Wall Drawings, 1968-1993); and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (Incomplete Cubes), which traveled to three art museums in the United States.

Sol LeWitt’s most recent retrospective was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000. The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.