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Sol LeWitt
Sol (Solomon) LeWitt was born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut and studied art at Syracuse University. He was drafted for the Korean War in 1951, and after his service moved to New York City to study illustration. He worked for a year as a graphic designer at the office of the architect I.M. Pei, and took on a job in the bookshop and as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, at a time when a young Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold and Lucy Lippard also had odd jobs at the museum. This was an environment LeWitt has later credited with helping him decide to become an artist.
His first solo exhibition was held in 1965, at John Daniels Gallery in New York. In 1967 and 1969 LeWitt wrote two short essays that came to define Conceptual Art: Paragraphs on Conceptual Art and Sentences on Conceptual Art. In 1967 he also funded Printed Matter together with Lucy Lippard and others, an organization dedicated to the funding and distribution of artists’ books. In 1968 he made his first wall drawing, for an exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Key solo exhibitions include John Weber Gallery, New York, NY (1974), Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1975), Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1978), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1984), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2000), Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2005-2006), Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2009), MOCA Chicago and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2010) and Dia Beacon, Beacon, NY (2006 and 2010). The exhibition Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at MassMoCA, North Adams, MA, will be on until the year 2033. Key group exhibitions include Primary Structures, The Jewish Museum, New York, NY (1966), Live in Your Head – When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (1969), Documenta 6 (1977) and 7 (1982), Kassel, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Münster (1987), Venice Biennale (1988) and the Istanbul Biennal (1989). In 2013, When Attitudes Become Form, which also included a work by Walter De Maria, was recreated at Fondazione Prada for the 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Magasin III had a large solo exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings in 2009 – 2010. His work was also included in the exhibitions After Construction: work from the collection (1994) and in Something Turned Into a Thing (2012 – 2013) at Magasin III.
Sol LeWitt moved Spoleto, Italy in the 1980s, and then later returned to Chester, Connecticut. He died in New York City in 2007.
Walter De Maria
Walter De Maria was born in Albany, near Berkeley in California in 1935, and studied Painting and Art at the University of California. He moved to New York in 1960, where he briefly ran a gallery, Great Jones Street, with Robert Whitman. In 1965-66 he became percussionist in the band that was to become the The Velvet Underground, but left the band shortly before Andy Warhol became the manager. He had his first solo exhibition outside of Great Jones Street at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York in 1965.
Key solo exhibitions include Beds of Spikes, Dwan Gallery, New York (1969), Skulpturen, Kunstmuseum Basel (1972) and 360 Degree I Ching/64 Sculpture, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1981). The 2000 Sculpture, an installation consisting of 2000 white polygons, was shown at Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich (1992), Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, Staatlische Museum zu Berlin, Berlin (2000) and more recently at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Other recent solo exhibitions include Silver Meters, Gold Meters, Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, NY (2010) and Triologies, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX (2012). Key group exhibitions include American Sculpture of the Sixties, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA / Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA (1966), Primary Structures, The Jewish Museum, New York, NY (1966), Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1967), Documenta 6, Kassel, (1968) and Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (1969). In 2013, When Attitudes Become Form was recreated at Fondazione Prada for the 55th Venice Biennale (2013).
Long-term installations include The New York Earth Room (1977), The Broken Kilometer (1979) and The Lightning Field (1977), all commissioned and maintained by the Dia Art Foundation, New York. The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), companion to The Broken Kilometer, is permanently installed in Kassel, Germany. Magasin III had a solo exhibition with Walter De Maria in 1988, shortly after the museum first opened. The following year, his work was also shown at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. His work was also included in the exhibition Thrice Upon a Time at Magasin III (2009- 2010). Along with his sculptures and land art, Walter De Maria made two musical compositions The Ocean Music, for Ocean and Drums (1968) and The Cricket Music, for Crickets and Drums (1964), and two short films: Three Circles and Two Lines in the Desert and Hard Core (both 1969). He won the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969, and in 1998 he made the monument to the Bicentennial of the French Revolution, a large sphere of polished granite that now stands outside the Assemblée Nationale in Paris.
Walter De Maria died in 2013 in Los Angeles, California.
Katharina Grosse
Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg/Breisgrau in Germany in 1961, and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She became Professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee in 2000, and then at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2010. Grosse has exhibited widely, including Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, (1988), the Sydney Biennial, Sydney (1998), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2000), the São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2002), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005), De Appel, Amsterdam (2006), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006), Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen (2009), MassMOCA, North Adams, MA (2010), De Pont Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Tilburg (2013) and Kunsthaus Graz, Graz (2014).
Recent outdoor projects include Just Two of Us, a commission for Public Art Fund, New York (Nov 2013 – Feb 2014) and Psycholustro, a series of seven installations commissioned by the City of Philadelphia Public Art Program that run along Philadelphia’s rail gateway (from May 16, 2014). Katharina Grosse had a solo exhibition, Infinite Logic Conference, at Magasin III in 2004. In 2007 her work was also included in the exhibition To Be Continued… at Magasin III. In 2012, she was commissioned to do a site-specific work for Vara council and the Public Art Agency Sweden: Vara train station, now entitled The Blue Orange.
Katharina Grosse lives and works in Berlin.
