Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt

One of the most influential artists of the late twentieth century, Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) is best known for his minimalist works of monumental scale, including wall drawings and modular structures. Alongside these works, however, he generated more than 350 print projects, comprising thousands of lithographs, silkscreens, etchings, aquatints, woodcuts, and linocuts. Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt explores the artist’s extensive printmaking, beginning with his earliest efforts and extending through his mature expressions in abstraction.

The exhibition is organized in four thematic sections reflecting the diverse formal languages that LeWitt pursued throughout his career: “Lines, Arcs, Circles, and Grids;” “Bands and Colors;” “From Geometric Figures to Complex Forms;” and “Wavy, Curvy, Loopy Doopy, and in All Directions.” Printmaking proved to be the perfect medium for LeWitt’s brand of conceptual art, in which the “idea becomes a machine that makes the art” and its “execution is a perfunctory affair.” Relying on predetermined plans and systems, he sought to distance himself and thus avoid any subjective or expressive interference. Instead, his goal was to present a “thought process.” Prints were ideal for realizing this rule-based art, ensuring an almost mechanical level of uniformity, multiplication, and variation. As LeWitt’s many prints demonstrate, however, ordered and logical ideas often result in contradiction and irrationality, especially in terms of the viewer’s perceptual experience and the captivating beauty of the artist’s colors, geometric forms, diverse lines, bands, and brushstrokes.