Comunicación con fines de promoción cultural de artistas incluidos en la Colección Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson protegidas por derechos de propiedad intelectual. Prohibida su reproducción, total o parcial, ni tratamiento por cualquier medio ni transmisión o cesión de cualquier forma, sin autorización del titular de los derechos sobre las obras.
Form derived from a cube
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: Sol Lewitt (Hartford, Connecticut, 1928-Nueva York, 2018
Title: Form derived from a cube
Year: 1986
Medium: painted wood
Dimensions: 80 x 80 x 80 cm
Throughout his life, LeWitt not only cultivated painting but also photography, printmaking, drawing and, most notably, sculpture. A large part of his output is based on a specific geometric form—the cube—configured as a basic or modular unit which he used in his “structures” (the word he coined for his sculptures), drawings, prints and photographs. In the early 1960s LeWitt turned to geometry as a systematic method with strict rules that governed the execution and design of a work of art. “The cube,” he asserted in 1966, “is the best form to use as a basic unit for any more elaborate function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed.”
The first of the pieces shown here revolves precisely around that geometric form. It belongs to the Form Derived from a Cube series that the artist started developing in the aforementioned media in 1981. Like some of his other structures, this one from 1986 is painted white, the intention being to minimise as far as possible the distraction created by the material from which the sculpture is made (wood). Starting with the basic cubic form, the artist decomposed its parts and then recomposed and altered them to develop a systematic and ordered structure in the space, which in this case recalls an arrow. In these works, the geometry reflects the eternal order, an idea that is further reinforced by the use of white mentioned above.
Form Derived from a Cube was shown at Die erste Sammlung. Von 1988 bis 1994. Positionen aktueller Kunst, an exhibition held in May 1994 at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. Originally owned by the Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in that city, it was sold in 1989 to a private collector and purchased by the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson at Sotheby’s, London, on 18 April 2023 (Lot 52).