A black outlined square with a red diagonal line centered on the axis between the upper left and lower right corners and another red diagonal line centered on the axis between the lower left and upper right corners.

April 1973

Red and black crayon

Courtesy of the Estate of Sol LeWitt

First Installation
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

First Drawn By
Sol LeWitt, Nicholas Logsdail

MASS MoCA Building 7
Ground Floor

The exhaustion of the possibilities of a simple geometric grammar forms the basis of LeWitt’s artistic practice, and the four early examples of location drawings on view at MASS MoCA (Wall Drawing 154, Wall Drawing 159, Wall Drawing 160 and Wall Drawing 164) provide a visual example of his working methods. In these location drawings, Sol LeWitt uses written instructions to describe geometric constructions on the wall. Whereas earlier drawings began to explore the possibilities of combining four different line directions and four different colors, this series explores the various results achieved by drawing straight lines to and from nine easily defined points. Crafting his drafting instructions in terms of the corners of the square, the midpoints of each side, and the center, LeWitt sets the vocabulary of construction for subsequent location drawings, the descriptions and constructions of which increase in complexity. These works show an artistic interest in the geometry of the wall, in geometric point-finding, and in the potential for communicating an image through textual instruction.

Collection of Harvey M. and Ruth Glesby Wagner