Sol LeWitt began his artistic career in the early 1960s and developed the medium of the wall drawing as a means of returning to the surface while avoiding the newly defined problems of painting. Consequently, he eliminated the physical support that usually lies between the exhibition wall and the artistic markings and placed them in an ideal space of their own.
LeWitt succeeded with his wall drawings in solving a whole series of problems that had plagued art, especially painting, and in opening up a broad new field of activity for himself. He avoided the illusionism, expressiveness, and narrative of painting. He excluded moments of perception from the work’s production, negated the importance of artistic execution, and left the work’s realization to others, without calling his own position as ‘author’ into question. LeWitt executed his first wall drawing at Paula Cooper Gallery in October 1968. He started exhibiting in Europe at Konrad Fischer Galerie in January 1968.
