A debut presentation of minimalist pioneer Sol LeWitt's torn and folded paper works, his brilliant extension of the parameters and definitions of drawing
Pbk, 9.5 x 13 in. / 160 pgs / 150 color. | 4/21/2020 | Out of stock $55.00
The famed Lambert Collection in Avignon owns more than 30 works by American conceptualist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), that together constitute a concise account of his evolution. This concise, elegantly produced volume documents these works, as well as LeWitt’s longstanding relationship with the collection.
An interview between Yvon Lambert, the Collection’s founder, a selection of illustrations and installation images from a 2018 exhibition of the Lambert Collection’s LeWitt holdings provide a summary of this important association for this key figure in postwar American art.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Text by Dieter Schwarz.
In 1966, Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) conceived a new type of work that he described as “drawings without drawing,” in which he replaced the act of drawing itself by using various ways of folding paper. In 1969, he started to regularly produce what he called Folds, first as gifts to friends, then as works to be distributed by his dealers. In 1971 he added the Rips, drawings made of ripped paper.
LeWitt developed this extended approach to drawing from ripping papers of various sizes and colors to working with city maps and aerial photos of Florence, Manhattan and Chicago from which he removed various areas. This systematic approach, on which so much of LeWitt’s work is famously based, was also applied to the Folds and the Rips, and so they tended to be created in series.
The book presents these works for the first time, along with a historical essay by Dieter Schwarz and full-color reproductions of the Folds and the Rips.
Published by Primary Information/Printed Matter, Inc..
Originally published in 1977, Four Basic Kinds of Lines & Colour is a classic artist’s book by preeminent conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). Featuring 34 pages of drawings, the work is an early example of LeWitt’s rigorous, algorithmic process in which a set of rules, applied to generate an image, are subsequently run through all of their permutations.
In the late 1960s LeWitt began applying this technique, first developed for his wall drawings, to artists’ books. In this publication, LeWitt demonstrates the 34 ways that basic lines (horizontal, vertical, left-facing diagonal and right-facing diagonal) can be rendered in four colors (red, yellow, blue and black), with each page displaying a single combination (for example, horizontal lines in blue).
The book is one of LeWitt’s signature bookworks, which in its original edition remains quite scarce, so this new facsimile edition is significant; almost none, if any, of his books (he produced over 50) have been reprinted.
Published by Koenig Books. Edited with text by Francesco Stocchi. Text by Rem Koolhaas, Adachiara Zevi.
Looking at a considerable range of works spanning the entire career of Sol LeWitt (1928–2007)—from seven of his famous Wall Drawings to sculptures such as Complex Form and Inverted Spiraling Tower, and including the photo-series Autobiography—this book explores the deeply intertwined relationship between LeWitt's work and architecture. Featuring a collaboration by the architect Rem Koolhaas—as a curator, for the first time ever—in dialogue with the curator Francesco Stocchi, Between the Lines addresses broad aspects of LeWitt's oeuvre, with the aim of moving beyond the divisions that traditionally separate architecture from art history (the flouting of which characterizes the artist's entire body of work). In particular, this book reformulates the still-popular assumption that an artwork must adapt to the architecture.
Published by Williams College Museum of Art. Edited by Charles W. Haxthausen. Text by Charles W. Haxthausen, Christianna Bonin, Erica DiBenedetto.
Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid is the first exhibition to focus on the centrality of the grid in LeWitt’s art. The exhibition focuses on LeWitt’s use of the grid as a generative matrix for his artistic production over the span of nearly five decades, from 1960 until his death in 2007. Inspired by his first encounter with the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1950s, LeWitt began experimenting with a loosely structured grid in several large oil paintings of 1960, based on the Muybridge motif of a running man. By 1962 he had simplified his use of this format to exclude figurative elements, and by 1964 he was making his first wall-mounted grid structures. When LeWitt made his first wall drawings in 1968 he used the grid as the underlying structural principle. Thereafter, grids became a pervasive matrix in all of the media in which LeWitt worked--three-dimensional “structures,” drawings and gouaches on paper, photographic cycles, artist’s books, furniture and wall drawings. Fully illustrated with 95 color images (and a plate section), the book includes three essays, including Charles W. Haxthausen on LeWitt’s relationship to the grid and classical music, especially Bach; Christianna Bonin on LeWitt’s relationship to Richard Serra and the wall drawing; and Erica DiBenedetto on LeWitt’s 1980 artist’s book, Autobiography, a publication consisting solely of 1,101 photographs of LeWitt’s New York studio, organized over 128 pages in nine-part grids.
PUBLISHER Williams College Museum of Art
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 9.5 x 10.5 in. / 120 pgs / 95 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 1/31/2013 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2013 p. 106
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780913697313TRADE List Price: $35.00 CAD $40.00
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Béatrice Gross. Text by Susanna Singer, John Hogan, Béatrice Gross, Lucy Lippard, Rosalind Krauss, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson.
Magnificent in scope, design and scholarship, this essential volume is the first comprehensive LeWitt monograph published since the artist's death, and the first overview since 2000. Besides gathering visual documentation of LeWitt's wall drawings and his sculptures-or "structures" as he preferred-the publication also includes his complete writings; spreads from his artist's books; plus interviews and essays by virtually every artist and author closely associated with LeWitt, among them Lucy Lippard, Rosalind Krauss, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham and Robert Smithson. One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, LeWitt at last receives the definitive treatment of his work in this volume. In his 1967 "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," Sol LeWitt set out the fundamental principle of his artistic practice: "In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.... The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." From the first wall drawing in 1968 until his death in 2007, LeWitt never ceased to develop new "machines," conceiving some 1,200 wall drawings and laying down the foundations of Conceptual and Minimalist art. LeWitt's wall drawings, always installed by assistants, eliminated any intermediary object (such as a canvas) between the work and its support, thereby dovetailing a sensuous material immediacy with a powerful Platonic detachment. His sculptural variations on grids, cubes and pyramids likewise project this moving simplicity and clarity. Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, where he took art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum. After receiving a BFA from Syracuse University he worked as a graphic designer in the office of architect I.M. Pei. In 1976, LeWitt cofounded the artists' book bookstore Printed Matter in New York, with Lucy Lippard. A retrospective of his wall drawings opened to the public in 2008 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, where it will remain on view for 25 years.
Sol LeWitt’s Matador Artist’s Portfolio contains 20 gouaches of vertical, horizontal and diagonal grids painted on monochrome backgrounds of varying colors, which are printed in pairs on heavy, folded card stock (11.75 x 15.75), contained loose-leaf within the folio. The works were made in 2003. The artist’s name appears embossed upon the cover.
Published by Edizioni Corraini. Text by Giorgio Maffei, Emanuele De Donno, Didi Bozzini, Cecilia Metelli, Marilena Bonomo.
“Books are the best medium for many artists working today,” Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) once declared. A pioneer of artist's books, and co-founder of New York's Printed Matter bookstore in 1976, LeWitt is closely identified with the book as an art form. Starting with 1967's Serial Project No. 1 (from Aspen magazine), and closing with Chicago (Morning Star Publications, 2002), this book reproduces covers and spreads from Sol LeWitt's massive oeuvre of artist's books, almost all of which are now rarities. As artist's book historian Clive Phillpot notes, “the principle attribute of LeWitt's books is one common to all books: a dependence upon sequence, whether of families of marks or objects, or of single or permuted series which have clear beginnings and endings.” Critical observations from LeWitt himself and a variety of scholars make this volume the most sustained treatment of LeWitt's prolific activity in this area to date.
Published by Damiani. Essay by Giovanni Maria Accame. Essay by Ester Coen.
Sol LeWitt, who once worked as a draftsman for I. M. Pei, has said of his own directions for drawings executed by collaborators that, "The contribution brought by the draftsman may not be predicted by the artist, even when the artist is also the draftsman." This separation of the plan, the written score for a work, from its execution and the finished piece lies at the center of the work for which LeWitt is best known, whose execution he entrusts to strangers. Wall Drawings tracks the creation of one recent work, beginning with the plan, so spare that it looks as though it might have arrived at the gallery by fax, and continuing through to a schematic drawing on the wall, then figures on stepladders drawing intently, their faces clear but their pencils blurred. Close-ups of their scribbles and images of the completed work are followed by a picture of the triumphant cast, a curtain call.
Published by Richter Verlag. Essay by Heinz Liesbrock.
Josef Albers and Sol LeWitt are split by fundamentally different understandings of their work, but united by a powerful, overarching and defining goal, the avoidance of emphatic ideas of authorship and the de-emphasis, even, of the star system inside an author's own oeuvre. Both keep their works from getting uppity by making each one part of a serial long-term study, rather than an individual potential masterpiece. LeWitt acknowledges and pays tribute to Albers's significance in his artistic development, and to the two men's connections, in Seven Basic Colors and All Their Combinations in a Square Within a Square, the title wall drawing, installed in the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop and reproduced here in its entirety.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Peter Pakesch. Essays by Paul Horwich, Marco de Michelis and Martin Prinzhorn.
With a wall of more than 140 tons of Ytong blocks, Sol LeWitt created a vivid combination of reactive installation and autonomous sculpture for the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria. This catalogue presents photographs and digital drawings of the sculptural project Wall, as well as four accompanying texts that demonstrate how this project relates to the important themes of the artist's work as a whole. LeWitt's sculptural work of the 1960s contributed to a change in our culture's perception of art, and laid the foundation for minimalist and conceptual works.
PUBLISHER Walther König, Köln
BOOK FORMAT Flexi-bound, 8.75 x 11 in. / 84 pgs / 32 color / 26 bw
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2004 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2005 p. 137
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783883758107SDNR30 List Price: $40.00 CAD $50.00
Published by Hopefulmonster. Essays by Marilena Bonomo, Tullio Degennaro, Lia De Venere, Angela Paltera. Ludovico Pratesi and Adachiara Zevi.
Featuring works created by artists for the city of Bari, Italy, and mounted between June and August, 2003, this volume documents the process and final execution of a monumental wall drawing by LeWitt, as well as two installations in a medieval blockhouse by Paladino, one of which is accompanied by original music from Brian Eno.
PUBLISHER Hopefulmonster
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 9.75 x 6.25 in. / 44 pgs / 12 color / 33 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 1/2/2004 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2004
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788877571779TRADE List Price: $18.00 CAD $20.00
Published by nai010 publishers. Artwork by Ulises Carrión, Francesco Clemente, Hamish Fulton, Anselm Kiefer, Sol Lewitt, Richard Long. Text by Rob Perrée.
Sol Lewitt makes them, Christian Boltanski does too. And Hamish Fulton, Francesco Clemente, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Long, Ulises CarriÄn, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Prince, and Andy Warhol. And many, many more. Examining the phenomenon of artist's books, Cover to Cover looks at the history of these bound objects within the context of art history. Concentrating particularly on artist's books created during the heyday of conceptual art, this volume describes the leading motives of publishers, collectors, and buyers, pinpointing to what extent artist's books and catalogs are distinct from one another, and why one genre increasingly contains references to the other. In his essay, Rob Perrªe considers issues of presentation and offers a prediction about the future of the artist's book. Published in conjunction with De Beyerd, Breda..