Exhibition View
To begin 2020, Krakow Witkin Gallery proudly announces an expansive exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s work. Through structures (LeWitt’s terminology for his three dimensional works) and gouaches, the exhibition displays forty years’ exploration of the cube. In addition, a large wall piece (“White styrofoam on black wall” from 1993) provides a bold contrast to all the rectilinear forms.
The exhibition contains an ‘open form’ structure, a ‘closed form’ structure, a ‘progression’ and an extremely rare 1968 “Hidden Cubes” structure that has never previously been exhibited. The works on paper present two ways LeWitt drew/painted cubes — isometric and trimetric. Furthermore, the different pieces help illuminate the processes he used to layer color on paper to create the variations of tone, positive/negative, foreground/background and surface/depth. By not using illustrative perspective, LeWitt honors the flatness of the paper by presenting all visible sides of the cube and the background as equal.
This sense of equality is key to understanding LeWitt’s work from the date of the first piece in the show (1968) to the last (2005). Visible and hidden, monochrome and polychrome, 3D and 2D, and numerous other seeming dichotomies are treated by LeWitt as mutually significant. LeWitt’s longtime assistant, Susanna Singer, describes LeWitt’s overall practice as ‘using a vocabulary to create language.’ This exhibition gives the audience an opportunity to revel in his language and hopefully celebrate the curiosity with which LeWitt approached life.
