Skip to main content
Advanced Search
Horizontal Brushstrokes
Horizontal Brushstrokes

Horizontal Brushstrokes

Artist (American, 1928 - 2007)
Date2003
MediumGouache on paper
Dimensions60 1/2 x 60 1/2 in.
ClassificationsGouache
Credit LineGift of the artist
Terms
    Object number2003.14
    Description"Horizontal Brushstokes"

    Sol LeWitt is a definitive explorer of minimal and conceptual forms. Over more than forty years, his career has yielded a multitude of works that chart the course of this exploration with artifacts in both two and three dimensions. His methods are basic: to take a straight line and see how many ways it can be put on a piece of paper or to take a cinder-block cube and, using its geometric simplicity, see how it can be stacked as a response to a specific historic or natural environment. These methods yield a complexity of form that resonates both with the logic of nature and as a statement about human cultural activity.

    Horizontal lines of orange, blue, and green delineate contemplation as the eye travels the waves of this optical sea in "Horizontal Brushstrokes". Hand and brush make the mark of continuous sinuous form from edge to edge. The question arises of placement of this object in a long career of sign/line making. Sol LeWitt is known for his wall drawings in which the geometry of the artist's thought yields to the completion of the thought by the hand of others.

    This work continues the exploration of concept and action but with the direct physical connection of the artist's hand. There is no remove between concept and fulfillment of the concept. This work is not a sketch or diagram of a work to be completed in larger scale on a different surface. Each colored band is put in time on paper and this work remains the final fluid testimony and artifact. JK



    Bibliography

    Gary Garrels,ed., "Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective", exbit. cat. (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2000)



    On View
    Not on view
      eMuseum
      Copyright © eMuseum