A black outlined square with a red horizontal line centered on the axis between the midpoint of the left side and the midpoint of the right side and a 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

Wall Drawing 164 shows an artistic interest in the geometry of the wall, in geometric point-finding, and in the potential for communicating an image through text-based instruction. It belongs to a series of drawings (that includes Wall Drawing 154, Wall Drawing 159, and Wall Drawing 160, all on display at MASS MoCA) that explore the various results achieved by drawing straight lines to and from nine easily defined points: the corners of the square, the midpoints of each side, and the center. By using these elemental positions on the wall, Sol LeWitt removes subjective decision-making from the compositions. The series of square and line drawings sets the vocabulary of construction for subsequent ‘location drawings’ such as Wall Drawing 238, Wall Drawing 274, and Wall Drawing 305, also on view at MASS MoCA.