INDIANAPOLIS.-Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing No. 652 is one of the first, most prominent art works that visitors encounter upon entering the newly renovated Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). Originally covering three walls surrounding a grand staircase, Wall Drawing No. 652 has since been re-created in the Pulliam Great Hall on a 34-foot-high wall that measures 60 feet in width.

“LeWitt’s lively wall drawing serves as a welcome to our many visitors,” said Lisa Freiman, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the IMA. “Its re-creation on such an expansive scale not only demonstrates the IMA’s commitment to showing the best of the world’s contemporary art, but also showcases its intention to become an important destination for contemporary art in the twenty-first century.”

The latest version of LeWitt’s monumental wall drawing is brighter than the original one. Rather than using Pelican ink washes, which have been discontinued since the work first was executed in 1990, LeWitt closely matched the original ink colors with acrylic paints. In the old version, the inks required a coat of varnish, which yellowed over time. The new acrylic paints are unvarnished and as a result appear more vibrant.

LeWitt, a conceptual artist, once explained, “[The] idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” LeWitt based both versions of the wall drawing on the same complex conceptual plan. Aside from the change from inks to acrylics, the only difference in the new version is that it needed to be extended downward and outward to accommodate the larger expanse of wall surface.

In the original diagram, LeWitt plotted points randomly across the surface of the paper and then connected them intuitively with lines. A team of assistants (two from LeWitt’s studio, Tomas Ramberg and Sara Heinemann, and five local Indianapolis student technicians: Rachel Eckstein, George Ben Murray, Brittan Fowler, Kate Nickols and Joshua Aaron) then set about the complex and laborious process of plotting the design onto the walls. They used LeWitt’s diagram to instruct them how to fill each form with particular combinations of red, yellow, blue and gray washes. All of the final colors in Wall Drawing No. 652 are unmixed and resulted from overlapping these pure washes of color.

The re-creation of Wall Drawing No. 652 was a monumental undertaking that took more than a month to complete. The first work was funded by the Dudley Sutphin Family; who generously funded the re-creation of the work in 2005.