Sol LeWitt, All combinations of red, yellow and blue straight and broken lines on red, yellow and blue, 1976, colour screenprint; recipient of the International Jury Prize, 12th International Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, 1977.
The exhibition included twenty prints made between 1976 and 1978. Sol LeWitt was an American artist who was connected with various art movements, but had a particular influence on the development of minimalism and conceptual art. He achieved fame with his wall drawings and sculptures named “structures” and expressed himself in various media, including prints and artist’s book. LeWitt’s practice was closely related to his thinking – he formulated a series of formal instructions that his assistants followed to create the works. In one of his essays, he wrote that, in conceptualism, “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art”. His visual vocabulary was composed of lines, basic colours and simplified shapes, which he used according to self-invented formulas that suggested mathematical equations and architectural specifications, yet were neither predictable nor necessarily logical. For LeWitt, the instructions for creating an artwork became the work itself; the work thus did not need to be materially present in order to be characterised as art.