SANTANDER.- The exhibition space of the Botín Foundation in Santander hosts the exhibition Sol LeWitt. 17 Wall Drawings. 1970-2015 from the 18th of July to the 10th of January 2016. Organized in collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery and the Estate of Sol LeWitt, it is Spain’s most ambitious exhibition to date devoted entirely to Wall Drawings by one of the leading lights of 20th century art who is regarded as the father of Conceptual Art.

The exhibition –curated by John Hogan, Director of Installations and archivist of Wall Drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery who, since 1982, worked as a drawer for Sol LeWitt; and by Benjamin Weil, Artistic Director of the Botín Centre– offer visitors a unique view of the stylistic and conceptual development of wall drawing in the artist’s oeuvre.

Sixteen of the Wall Drawings from the selection on display in the exhibition, executed between 1970 y 2015, have never been shown before in Spain –only the seventeenth drawing was previously shown in Spain in 1989– and most of them have never been shown again since they were first made more than twenty years ago. In addition, Wall Drawing 7A has been executed for the first time in the Botín Foundation’s exhibition space.

Sol LeWitt. 17 Wall Drawings. 1970-2015 revolves around one of LeWitt’s basic theoretical principles which has since then become widespread in the practice of contemporary visual art, namely, the supremacy of the idea and of the creative process over the work of art proper. As the artist himself pointed out: “the idea is the machine that makes the work of art”.

Additionally, the collection of Wall Drawings on show in Santander reflects the extraordinary consistency of LeWitt’s systematic explorations and the notable diversity and evolution of his artistic praxis, both from a stylistic point of view (from his simple geometric figures to "continuous" and "complex" forms) and in terms of the variety of media used (graphite, colour pencils, India ink and acrylic paint).

Apart from the works on view in the exhibition space, visitors will be able to view Wall Drawing #499 (Flat-topped pyramid with color ink washes superimposed, 1986, originally installed in the conference hall of the Botín Foundation in Santander in 1992, which has been re-installed for this exhibition.

Sol LeWitt devoted a substantial part of his career to producing books, publications, prints and other multiples. The Archivo Lafuente, a key international documentary collection specializing in 20th century art, has collaborated to complement the exhibition with a selection of artist books that will help visitors contextualize Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings with the rest of his oeuvre. Lastly, a relevant collection of documents related to the artist and his work is on display in the exhibition.

The show is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue collecting some of Sol LeWitt’s writings, alongside several texts by experts and personal recollections by contributing artists. The exhibition’s curator Benjamin Weil has made the selection, which explores the artist’s development and oeuvre.

Sol LeWitt. 17 Wall Drawings. 1970-2015 reaffirms the Botín Foundation’s ongoing commitment to research into the genre of drawing (which up to this point has focussed on Spanish artists) and it directs the spotlight back onto an exploration of the creative process, which is a key aspect of the institution’s training programme that includes the Visual Arts Grants and the Villa Iris Workshops, given by international artists.

Sol LeWitt was a key player in the establishment of Conceptual Art, a movement that has made a deep and lasting mark on contemporary artistic praxis. At the beginning of the 1960’s, artists distanced themselves from the predominant Abstract Expressionism and conferred equal, or even greater importance, to the creative process leading to the work of art than the resultant work of art itself, thus separating the concept or idea from its execution.

In the year 1967, LeWitt published an article in Artforum titled Paragraphs on Conceptual Art that has come to be regarded as a genuine manifesto of Conceptual Art. In it he stated: “All intervening steps, scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed work models, studies thoughts, conversations, are of interest. Those that show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product”.

In 1971 added: “If the artist carries through his idea and makes it into visible form, then all the steps in the process are of importance. The idea itself, even if not made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product”.

The Wall Drawings
Sol LeWitt created more than 1,200 Wall Drawings from 1968 to 2007. He made the first of them in 1968 at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, as part of an exhibition to raise funds for student committees mobilized against the Vietnam War.

Drawing on the wall and intervening materially, conceptually and directly with the exhibition space, the artist disintermediated the art object. His gesture involved an ephemeral materialization of the work of art, which could be erased and recreated in another space by someone else, thus freeing the work from its pedestal and from its condition as a unique object.

In order to execute these Wall Drawings, LeWitt developed a singular work method based on simple logical or mathematical instructions that anyone could be carry out. Despite occasionally realizing some of the drawings himself, most of them were carried out by artists or students. In Santander, the 17 Wall Drawings have been executed by a team of drawers, who formerly worked with LeWitt, aided by young artists and art students.

The techniques and stylistic elements of the Wall Drawings evolved as time passed. While the early ones were made in black pencil and, subsequently, in colour pencils, at the beginning of the 1980’s LeWitt began to employ ink washes, which conferred the pieces a quality similar to fresco painting. From 1997 he introduced acrylic paint, creating broad fields of intense, vivid colours.

From the beginning of his artistic voyage, the concept of serialism (the repetition and combination of elements), which the artist developed in his Wall Drawings, represented the bedrock of his work. From 1969 to 1970, LeWitt produced four series of drawings on paper (Drawing Series I, II, III & IV), based on what he described as his “coat of arms”: a square containing a set of four squares, each of which featured one of the four basic types of lines used by LeWitt: vertical, horizontal, diagonal upward and diagonal downward. The first series (Drawing Series I) consists of twenty-four different combinations of this same structure, while the following three series (Drawing Series II, III, and IV) result from possible permutations of the first.

The artist reduces the colour range used in the Wall Drawings to four prime colours: grey, red, yellow and blue, which correspond to the four basic types of lines. By superimposing these colours, LeWitt creates an unlimited variety of new tones. Over time the relatively austere combinations of curved and straight lines of his first works led gradually to increasingly irregular and dynamic models and forms.

After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in 1949 at Syracuse University, Sol LeWitt (Connecticut, 1928 – New York, 2007) served in the United States army in the Korean War. In 1959 he moved to New York where he studied at a school of illustrators and worked in the publishing sector until 1956, the year in which he joined the architecture studio of I. M. Pei in New York as a graphic designer. This contact with architects was an important constituent in the development of his thinking about art making. In the same manner that architects conceive of buildings without needing to actually build them, Sol LeWitt believed that artists could create “the idea or the concept” and detach themselves from its execution.

In 1960 he took a job at the bookshop of the MoMA alongside the art critic Lucy Lippard. Subsequently, he joined the security team of the New York museum, where his co-workers included artists such as Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin and Robert Mangold.

During this decisive stage of his artistic career, Sol LeWitt took part in a number of seminal group exhibitions such as Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966, which signalled the start of so-called Minimalist Art. In 1967 he published Paragraphs on Conceptual Art and in 1968 he took part in Documenta IV in Kassel. In 1969 he was included in the exhibition When Attitude Becomes Form, curated by Harald Szeeman at the Kunsthalle in Bern, and that same year he published Sentences on Conceptual Art in the American art magazine Artforum.

The Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Amsterdam hosted a complete retrospective of his Wall Drawings in 1984 and published a full inventory of all the ones that had been made. In 2006, under the initiative of the Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and the Williams College Museum of Art invited Sol LeWitt to work on a retrospective exhibition. The artist selected the works to be presented and chose their location, but he died before the opening, in 2008, at the age of 78. This monumental exhibition will remain open until at the Mass MoCA until 2033.

LeWitt’s work is to be found in the most important museum collections worldwide, including: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, MACBA in Barcelona, Tate Modern in London, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and Dia Art Foundation in New York; as well as National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC., and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).