Sol LeWitt

Private Collection, Italy

Exhibition Catalogue, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum; Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, Sol Lewitt Wall Drawings 1968- 1984, 1984, p. 132, illustrated
Exhibition Catalogue, Perugia, Centro Espositivo della Rocca Paolina, Sol Lewitt in Italia, 1998, pp. 112-13, illustrated
Tiddy Rowan, Ed., At Home with Art, London 2006, p. 8-9, illustrated
Adachaiara Zevi, Ed., L’Italia nei Wall Drawings di Sol Lewitt, Milan 2012,  p. 196, illustrated

The work of art is the certificate of authenticity, which will allow the purchaser to have the work realised at their own specifications and expense with the Sol Lewitt Estate.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Alongside many seminal minimalist artists in the 1960s, Sol LeWitt sought to reduce his art to its most basic form and to uncover the elementary origins of the structural world. After a brief period as a graphic designer in the office of the architect I.M.Pei in the 1950s, he continued to view himself as a designer rather than an artist, often planning works but then passing on construction to an assistant. Concerning himself with geometry, the framework of the cube assumed primary importance in his work, and in the 1960s it became LeWitt’s modular unit as he freed himself from the inherited constraints of painting versus sculpture versus architecture. Using the grid as his basic ingredient, present in his ‘structures’, wall paintings and drawings, LeWitt found he had a seemingly unlimited lexicon at his fingertips.

The pieces from Casagrande’s colletion showcase two different manifestations of LeWitt’s work, which he developed after the inspirational time he spent working at MoMA in New York alongside Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin and Robert Mangold. These monochromatic pieces share an austere, industrial quality that is coherent with the majority of LeWitt’s oeuvre. Firstly, we can consider the wall drawing, #362/d, which is from a series that gained international recognition in the late 1960s. The premise at work here is two–dimensionality, and as LeWitt explored the most direct way to achieve this, he finally landed on his practise of using the wall as his sheet of paper. When he first began to produce these pieces, he worked in graphite before later moving to crayon, and ultimately using a rich application of Indian ink, as seen in the present work. This final choice of medium was said to be the result of his move to Spoleto, Italy in the 1970s, where he was overwhelmed by the beauty and permanence of frescoes by Giotto. The clean trapezoid shape here, constructed from three of the four basic types of lines (vertical, horizontal, diagonal left, and diagonal right), plays and interacts with the surrounding architectural space, holding our attention with its objective clarity in a truly modern manner.