Wall Drawing 142

A 10-inch (25 cm) grid covering the wall. An increasing number of vertical not straight lines from the left side and horizontal not straight lines from bottom to top, adding one line per row of the grid. All lines are spaced evenly based on the number of lines, filling the last row of each direction.

June 1972

Black pencil

Yale University Art Gallery
Gift of the LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut, in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Shapiro, B.A. 1956

First Installation

Private residence

First Drawn By

Jo Watanabe

MASS MoCA Building 7
Ground Floor

Sol LeWitt’’s wall drawings of the 1970s are categorized by broad variety and experimentation. While his earliest wall drawings were largely comprised of straight lines in four directions, in the 1970s he pushed the organization and form of the line in many new directions. Wall Drawing 142, for instance, explores the notion of a grid of increasing vertical and horizontal not straight lines, in which the size of the wall determines the number of lines in each section of the grid. Thus, each wall that the drawing is executed on will create different results. In dictating that the lines must be ‘not straight,’ LeWitt allows the curves of the draftsman’’s natural gesture to show, making each individual line unique.

As he did in Wall Drawing 142, LeWitt employs a grid structure in many of his drawings. This device enabled him to organize his compositions in a nonhierarchical manner; grids allowed him to avoid prioritizing one form over another.