Artists

Sol LeWitt

Hartford, USA 1928-2007

The American artist Sol LeWitt was born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut. He worked for a short period of time as a graphic designer in New York, at the studio of the architect I.M. Pei, winner of the Pritzker Prize (prestigious international architecture award).

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LeWitt became famous as a leading figure of Minimalism and Conceptualism; in the 1960s he carried out a radical transformation of artistic taste through temporary wall drawings and three-dimensional structures such as open cubes, spheres, squares and other basic geometric figures with a minimal character, where he excluded as many details as possible regarding the shape even though it was still perceived.

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His works are called conceptual because they aim to highlight the idea even more than the aesthetic, distancing themselves from the tradition in which art should be based solely on objects. For LeWitt, the idea is "a machine that makes art", even more authoritative than the finished work. Precisely for this reason, LeWitt sometimes prefers to commission his assistants to execute the mural drawings, giving them a written document with the various directives which, however, they do not necessarily have to follow meticulously; they can in fact, within certain limits, vary and modify the representation.

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His works are exhibited in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Center National d'Art Moderne Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Moderna Museet Stockholm and the Tate Gallery, London.