Half-Off B

Alongside artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt is one of the key figures of Minimalist Art and with his “Paragraphs and Sentences on Conceptual Art” from 1967 and 1968 he is also the brains behind Conceptual Art. Both art movements have been highly influential from the mid-1960s until today. LeWitt, who has been exhibited in all major museums worldwide, is best known for his more than 1,200 rule-based, site-specific wall drawings and his modular three-dimensional works but he also worked extensively with prints, drawings and gouache. The key to his art lies in the importance he assigned to the artwork’s underlying idea rather than its actual physical shape.

The National Museum owns a series of gouaches and two three-dimensional works by LeWitt. Half-off B is an example of what LeWitt called the structures (rather than “sculptures”) that he did from the mid 1960s. Most of these works are built out of sequences of cubes in an abundance of variations. Since the cubes are open, they reveal the skeleton or the structure that at the same time constitutes the artwork. LeWitt used the cube because “the most interesting characteristic of the cube is that it is relatively uninteresting. It is best used as a basic unit for any more elaborate function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed.” This kind of deadpan analytics seems typical for LeWitt and is perhaps best portrayed by his 1. Sentence on Conceptual Art, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”