Wall Drawing 138

Circles and arcs from the midpoints of four sides. (ACG 59)

July 1972

Black pencil

Courtesy of the Estate of Sol LeWitt

First Installation

MTL Gallery, Brussels

First Drawn By

P. de Jong, Sol LeWitt, F. Spillemackers, L. Verdeeck

MASS MoCA Building 7
Ground Floor

In the early 1970s Sol LeWitt expanded his vocabulary of straight, parallel pencil to include arcs and circles. In 1972, he created a book, Arcs, Circles, and Grids, for the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, which contained pen and ink drawings depicting all possible combinations of the three elements in the title. These combinations take into account both the type of line (arc, circle, grid) and all the possible points on the page from which an arc can emanate (the four corners, and the four midpoints of the sides.) Many of the combinations in the book were also turned into wall drawings both before and after the book’’s publication. Wall Drawing 138, for instance, was created from Arcs, Circles, and Grids combination 59. This is indicated in the subtitle of the wall drawing. While drawing arcs and circles on paper was not a particularly challenging task, drawing them on large walls necessitated the creation of a giant compass with holes drilled into it at intervals, indicating the placement of the arcs and circles. On both paper and the wall, the overlapping of arcs and circles produces a myriad of optical patterns.