Wall Drawing 295

Six white geometric figures (outlines) superimposed on a black wall.

October 1976

White crayon on black wall

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Purchased with matching funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Modern and Contemporary Art Council (M.76.103)

First Installation
Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles

First Drawn By
Chris D’Arcangelo, Sol LeWitt

MASS MoCA Building 7
Ground Floor

By the 1970s, Sol LeWitt had expanded his formal vocabulary (originally just a series of parallel, straight lines) to include geometric shapes. These were first limited to ‘primary shapes,’ which he defined as circle, square and triangle, but he soon added ‘secondary shapes,’ or rectangles, trapezoids, and parallelograms. Wall Drawing 295 depicts these six primary and secondary shapes. In the drawing the shapes are superimposed, or layered, within the square. This superimposition technique entered LeWitt’’s practice in his early line wall drawings; his wall drawings of the late 1960s and early 1970s consisted mostly of lines going in four basic directions (vertical, horizontal, diagonal left, and diagonal right.) These four types of lines were often layered on top of each other, allowing for more possibilities of line combinations and the creation of gradations in tone. In Wall Drawing 295, the draftsmen layer the shapes within the square, revealing structural commonalities.