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SOL LEWITT
(American, born 1928)
Incomplete Open Cube, #7/1, 1974
From the series Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes
Aluminum and enamel
42 x 42 x 42”
Gift of the John Weber Gallery 1976.9

Sol LeWitt—American sculptor, printmaker, and draftsman—was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and studied at Syracuse University from 1945 to 1949. He served in the U.S. Army, in Japan and Korea, in the early 1950s, and in 1953 he attended cartoonist and illustrator’s school. From 1955-1956, LeWitt worked as a graphic designer for famed architect I.M. Pei, and soon began to create his own work based on pared-down geometry. For LeWitt, the idea, or concept, is central to his minimal forms. Technical assistants fabricate his pieces according to his ideas and plans, thereby suppressing the artist’s individual personality, hand, or signature in favor of a mathematically formulated conception, impersonal execution, and serial progression. Incomplete Open Cube is one in a series of compositions based on the fundamental modular unit of a cube. LeWitt revels in simple geometry in this freestanding, three-dimensional structure that defines one of the infinite configurations that can be generated from a pure, single cube. According to the artist, the viewer discovers and mentally completes the cube by perceiving elements both present and absent, seen and unseen.