Wall Drawing 1171

Five degrees of scribbles: A cube without a cube; A cube without a corner.

August 2005

Black pencil

Collection of Arne and Milly Glimcher

First Installation
Glimcher Residence, East Hampton, New York

First Drawn By
Anthony Sansotta, Roland Lusk

MASS MoCA Building 7
Third Floor

In the early 1980s, Sol LeWitt began to play with isometric drafting methods, in which a three-dimensional object is represented perspectivally in a two-dimensional drawing. Wall Drawing 1171 depicts two variations of the cube: the “cube without a cube” and the “cube without a corner.”

First executed in August 2005, Wall Drawing 1171 is part of a series of “scribbled” wall drawings that LeWitt began that year. In this series, LeWitt returns to graphite, the medium of his early wall drawings, and abandons color, which had been a primary aspect of his work since the 1980s. The loose, irregular scribbles in five degrees of density are encaged in the rigid, geometric cubes, striking a balance between chaos and control. The illusionism here is complicated — the isometric perspective does not use vanishing points, so there is no recession of space. Thus, LeWitt is able to show volume without contradicting the flatness of the wall.