Incomplete Open Cube 7/29
Artist
Sol LeWitt
(American, 1928–2007)
Datedesigned 1974, fabricated 1991
Mediumpainted aluminum
Dimensions101.6 x 101.6 x 101.6 cm (40 x 40 x 40 in.)
ClassificationsSculpture
Credit LineStoddard Acquisition Fund
Object number2010.317
Label TextSol LeWitt was a leader during the 1960s-70s in establishing a minimalist aesthetic and the conceptual practice of making art from the premise that an artist’s originating idea determined the physical form it would take. A preference for the clarity of elemental forms, system-based compositions, and execution by professional fabricators resulted in the radical replacement of subjective expression by objective thought. Beginning in 1974, LeWitt conceived of Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, a project which systematically represented the 122 possible variations of the cube (based on all combinations from 3-sided to 11-sided forms). Incomplete Open Cube 7/29 is the 29th in the sequence of all 32 possible configurations with 7 sides.
LeWitt’s career-long fascination with the modernist white cube—the “least emotive” 3-D form—was not in its complete, solid, and ideal state but as an incomplete, open, and contradictory structure. Experiencing this work depends upon our mental construction of a complete cube and, as we move around it, our discovery of the constant play between density and openness, clarity and confusion. LeWitt turned the basic, familiar cube into a meditation on multiplicity, unpredictability, and complexity. “Conceptual art is not necessarily logical…The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.”
ProvenanceJo Watanabe and Sachiko Cho, Brooklyn, NYOn View
Not on view
