Wall Drawing 725A

On a blue wall, a black square within a white border.

April 1993

India ink, color ink wash, gouache

Yale University Art Gallery, Katharine Ordway Fund

First Installation
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts

First Drawn By
Sachiko Cho, Leslie Maloney, Shawn Perry, Anthony Sansotta, Philip Sirois

MASS MoCA Building 7
Second Floor

Originally paired with its red counterpart, the blue detail of Wall Drawing 725A references some of Sol LeWitt’’s earliest serial pieces. These wall structures, appearing first in the early 1960s, consisted of rectangular canvases painted in an elemental color and wood blocks painted in contrasting or complementary hues. The artist strived to conflate the structure’s material topography with the perceptual obtrusions and recessions of the color fields.

Though LeWitt’’s wall drawings reject physical depth, Wall Drawing 725A implies dimensionality through the same color relationships used in the wall structures. The artist played with the uniformity of the wall’’s surface, inviting the viewer to read the successive squares as discrete layers or frames. As such, the squares take on negative and positive spatial qualities: the white border springs forward, circumscribing a window-like penetration in the center.