Wall Drawing 335

(Detail: square and circle)

On four black walls, white vertical parallel lines, and in the center of the walls, eight geometric figures (including cross, X) within which are white horizontal parallel lines. The vertical lines do not enter the figures.

May 1980

White crayon on black wall

Tate: Purchased 1980

First Installation
Lisson Gallery, London

First Drawn By
David Connearn, Jo Watanabe

MASS MoCA Building 7
Second Floor

Throughout the 1970s Sol LeWitt expanded his vocabulary to include broken lines, not-straight lines, lines drawn at random, arcs, circles, and lines demarcating basic geometric shapes. These shapes originally included circles, rectangles, and triangles, but soon extended to rectangles, trapezoids and parallelograms, which LeWitt considered to be secondary shapes. At the point that Wall Drawing 335 was conceived, the artist had begun to fill in the shapes with parallel lines.

LeWitt also adopted a new material around this time; he replaced the fine pencil lines of the early drawings with thicker markings created by crayon. In the mid-1970s LeWitt also began working with black, yellow, red, and blue backgrounds.

Backstory
Wall Drawing 335 was originally executed in white chalk. The chalk proved to be extremely dusty, however, and LeWitt eventually switched to a water-soluble white crayon, like those used to create the drawing at MASS MoCA.