Sol LeWitt
Wrote instructions for wall drawings and let other people execute them, for forty years.
Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford in 1928 and set out in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art in 1967 the position that the idea is the machine that makes the art. From 1968 he made Wall Drawings: sets of written instructions, sometimes a single sentence, executed directly onto a wall by draughtsmen following them, so the work exists as a certificate and a diagram and is remade each time it is installed and destroyed when the show closes. Alongside them he made the modular open cube Structures, and a large output of gouaches and prints. He died in 2007.
The Wall Drawings are the defining case in the market for instruction-based art: what changes hands is the certificate and the diagram, the buyer has the right to have the work executed by an approved draughtsman, and a work executed without the certificate is not the work. The certificate is therefore the asset, and its condition and completeness are everything. The Structures exist in editions and fabrications that need identifying. Prints, particularly the linocuts, etchings and screenprints, are numerous, well catalogued and are the accessible end of the output.
If you own a work by Sol LeWitt
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.