A wall divided from the upper left to the lower right by a curvy line; left: glossy yellow; right: glossy purple.

June 1998

Acrylic paint

Courtesy of the Estate of Sol LeWitt

First Installation
Galleria d’’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Palazzo Forti, Verona

First Drawn By
Cristina Caterinangeli, Anthony Sansotta

MASS MoCA Building 7
Third Floor

Many of Sol LeWitt’’s earliest painted wall drawings were executed in monochrome black. However, as he gained experience with the medium, he began to experiment with the bold, highly saturated colors that the paint produced. In Wall Drawing 852, for example, he divided a wall in half, one side in yellow paint and the other in purple paint. The two colors are divided by a wavy line (a type of line frequently used in early painted wall drawings), which makes the contrast between the yellow and purple even more striking optically. At MASS MoCA, Wall Drawing 852 is shown on the same wall as Wall Drawing 853, which depicts a square containing red and green divided by a wavy line and a square containing orange and blue divided by a wavy line. In setting both wall drawings on the same wall, LeWitt creates a finite series of complementary primary and secondary colors; all three complementary pairings are shown.