NEW YORK, NY.- The Paula Cooper Gallery announced the exhibition of an important wall drawing conceived by Sol LeWitt for the Venice Biennale of 1988. Not exhibited since, Wall Drawing #564: Complex forms with color ink washes superimposed has been installed in the main gallery at 534 W 21st Street from September 3 through October 12.

Wall Drawing #564 belongs to a series of wall drawings from the late 1980s, which made use of multifaceted geometric forms and color ink washes. To achieve rich and luminous surfaces, LeWitt devised a specific system of superimposing pigments, layer upon wet layer, with ink-soaked rags. LeWitt, who had moved to Spoleto, Italy, in the late 1970s credited his transition from graphite pencil or crayon to vivid ink washes, to his encounter with the frescoes of Giotto, Masaccio, and other early Florentine painters.

Sol LeWitt, whose pioneering style defies categorization, executed his first wall drawing for Paula Cooper’s inaugural show in 1968. A critical departure from the tradition of object-based art, he believed in the “primacy of the idea.” LeWitt went so far as to offer precise plans with which his assistants could execute his work, much as composers creates scores for their musicians.

Sol LeWitt (1928 – 2007) was born in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1953 he moved to New York where had his first one-person show at the John Daniels Gallery in 1965. The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague presented his first retrospective exhibition in 1970, and his work was later shown in a major mid-career retrospective curated by Alicia Legg at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1978.

LeWitt's works are in numerous public collections. To name a few: the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre National d’Art Moderne Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Turin’s Castello di Rivoli, the Moderna Museet Stockholm and the Tate Gallery, London.

In November 2008 “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” opened at MassMOCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), and will remain on view for 25 years.

Another example of LeWitt’s ink wash wall drawings, Wall Drawing #576C (also from 1988) is on view at the gallery’s 521 West 21st Street location.