Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #436: Asymmetrical pyramid with color ink washes superimposed, currently installed on loan from the LeWitt Foundation at Brown University’s Health and Wellness Center as part of the Public Art program, features five asymmetrical triangles resembling the unfolded faces of a pentagonal pyramid. LeWitt employed a minimalist style in his drawings, convinced that the value of art lies in the quality of the idea rather than its physical form. Using a combination of colors, geometrical shapes, and textures, his work derives inspiration from various movements of mid-twentieth century American art that similarly depicted simplified and abstract figures.

Featuring a combination of prints, collage, and painting by Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, and Charmion Von Wiegand drawn from the Bell Gallery Collection, the objects on display echo an amalgam of the styles and visual forms entwined in the work of LeWitt and his peers. Geometric shapes, abstraction, and hard-edge colors merge in these pieces through seriality and repetition. Straight and curved lines clash and evade one another, creating multiple perspectives from which to view this grouping. Imbued with a sense of dynamism, these two-dimensional compositions contest the stillness of the walls, creating tension between the works and viewers traversing List Lobby. 

– Susana Turbay Botero, Curatorial Fellow, David Winton Bell Gallery / Brown Arts Institute

Image: Frank Stella, Gezira, 1967. Lithograph, 15 x 22 inches. Gift of Lawrence Rubin, PR 1979.1257.