Master Drawings New York x IFPDA Print Fair

In the fall of 2023, Zeit Contemporary Art presented a selection of gouaches by Sol LeWitt within Master Drawings New York's showcase at the IFPDA Print Fair, devoted that year to the relationship between drawing and printmaking. LeWitt is most widely known for conceptual, often monumental installations. This booth offered a more intimate register of his practice instead, one in which precision and system gave way to the viewer's own interpretation.

The presentation opened with Complex Forms, from 1989, among the most sophisticated works of LeWitt's late career. It became the basis for a major wall drawing now in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and for a five-etching print portfolio of the same title published the following year. As a starting point, the gouache showed just how directly LeWitt's works on paper could generate both large-scale installation and disciplined print series from a single set of governing ideas.

Further gouaches from the Wavy Lines, Irregular Grid, and Irregular Form series carried this logic through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, each giving rise to its own printmaking projects. Moving between drawing and printmaking gave LeWitt a way to catalogue free gesture, developing organic, abstract forms through variants and permutations in serial form. The two mediums fed each other throughout, and the presentation treated LeWitt's gouaches and prints accordingly, as two intimately related bodies of work rather than separate pursuits.