Miami Art Museum. LeWitt x 2

From Feb 23rd through Jun 3rd, 2007LeWitt x 2 is a new two-part exhibition presented by Miami Art Museum, featuring both the work of Sol LeWitt, and a selection of the contemporary art collection that the artist has created with his wife, Carol Androccio LeWitt. Born in Connecticut in 1928, Sol LeWitt is considered among the most influential artists of the mid-twentieth century, generally linked to art movements such as Conceptual Art and Minimalism. LeWitt’s monumental wall drawings – produced for public and private spaces since the 1960s – may be the works for which he is best known. When MoMA presented a retrospective of LeWitt’s art in 1978, Curator of Drawing Bernice Rose noted that the artist’s wall drawings were “as important for drawing as Pollock’s use of the drip technique had been for painting during the 1950s.” However, there was a lot ahead for an artist who constantly pushes the limits of art history and contemporary trends. Over the years, his works have evolved to include geometry and colorful combinations of shapes, merging graphic arts and architectural backgrounds with his abstract notions of meaning acquired from Conceptual Art and Minimalism. The result will be on view in the first part of the exhibition. Sol LeWitt: Line and Structure includes 45 works on paper, sculptures and maquettes created by the artist dating from the 1960s to the present. But it also includes the premier showing of LeWitt’s recent Scribble drawings, or better, Structures, – as the artist himself likes to call them – including examples of his “open cube” series which have been an ongoing part of his work for over several decades now. Less experimental are a series of gouache paintings created by the artist between 1986 and 2005. The second part, Selections from the LeWitt Collection, features approximately 100 works that “the LeWitts” have been collecting from friends and fellow artists since the 1960s. Many of them were gifts or trades from his artist friends, that equals to works from a number of key artists mainly associated with the Conceptual and Arte Povera movements. Carl Andre, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gilbert and George, Donald Judd and Mario Merz among other significant authors are included. It’s sometimes said that we cannot have a true sense about the work of a contemporary artist without understanding his personal life first. This seems to be true for Dean Swanson, curator of the exhibition, who has built up a great, yet strange addition to the show by including the Lewitt’s own art collection.