To reopen her legendary New York gallery space at 534 West 21st Street, Paula Cooper knew she wanted an exhibition that felt not only important, but meaningful. It would be the first time back in her headquarters since 2018, when neighboring construction damaged the gallery and forced a temporary decampment to West 26th Street.
Four years later, the return feels like more than just a homecoming; it’s a celebration of both this particular space—it was one of the very first galleries to arrive in Chelsea when it opened in 1996, and since then has hosted the work of such artists as Donald Judd, Jennifer Bartlett, and Lynda Benglis—and the art world luminary at its helm. Before moving her gallery to Chelsea, Cooper, now 84, pioneered another neighborhood: She was the first to open an art gallery in SoHo, then industrial and near-desolate, in 1968.
So yes, the reopening had Cooper in a reflective mood. One artist jumped out as the natural choice to meet the moment: Sol LeWitt, the influential postwar American artist known for his contributions to the conceptual and minimalist art movements, and a dear friend of Cooper’s until his death in 2007. “Sol’s been such an important person and artist in my life—really, hugely important, and at this late stage for me, going back to that space was very important, so it just seemed logical,” Cooper said by phone recently.
Opening on what would have been LeWitt’s 94th birthday earlier this month, “Sol LeWitt: Drawings & Structures” traces the artist’s career from the 1960s through the 1990s. Wall Drawing #485 (1986) greets visitors in the newly reopened gallery, washing the whole cathedral-like space (its pitched wood-beam ceiling, obscured by an earlier owner, was revealed during renovations after she purchased the building in ’95) in vivid persimmon overlaid with triangular swaths of cerulean, apricot, cadmium yellow, and a purplish brown. In a smaller front room that looks out onto West 21st Street, two wall drawings, also from ’86, face off in mirroring shades of gray, a moody contrast to the boldness of the main wing.
The wall drawings, each part of LeWitt’s Pyramids series and recreated here by a team of artists working off LeWitt’s meticulous instructions, hold particular significance—and sentiment—for this exhibition: Paula Cooper Gallery hosted LeWitt’s first-ever wall drawing at its inaugural show in 1968. (He would go on to design approximately 1,350 geometric wall drawings ranging in color and shape, which have been installed thousands of times in locations around the world.)
Striking in its nuanced color palette, Wall Drawing #485 offers LeWitt fans a look at a perhaps unexpected work in the prolific artist’s oeuvre. “A lot of people weren't familiar with the ’80s wall drawings. They haven’t been shown as much,” says Cooper. Look closely at the pigment-soaked walls and a deep, almost leathery texture emerges, a result of the installation process: It took 12 people 26 days to complete, raising themselves on lifts to dab layer upon layer of ink wash across the walls as ’70s funk music blared in the background.
This process, in which a group of people follows instructions in order to install the piece, which at least in theory could happen an infinite number of times, is essential to understanding LeWitt as an artist. “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work,” LeWitt wrote in an essay for Artforum in 1967. He continued: “All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.” So the work is not the physical manifestation of the drawing, but the idea itself, which lives on in perpetuity. Wall drawings, as the name suggests, are painted directly onto the wall, not a canvas or other movable material, and after the show run has ended, they are simply painted over. Cooper remembers discussing with LeWitt what would happen to that first wall drawing as her 1968 show drew to a close. “He said, ‘Just paint it out.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ But then I got used to it. I trusted that they could come back, they could reappear.”
Accompanying the wall drawings at 534 West 21st Street are four glossy-white aluminum structures (LeWitt’s preferred term over “sculptures”) made between 1987 and 1990. Their peaks and valleys complement the pyramid-like wall drawings, a more tactile representation of such mammoth geometries. I asked Cooper what she thought about LeWitt’s decision-making around two versus three dimensions in his work. “He didn’t separate things. Dimension is dimension. Space is space,” she said. “With Sol, it was natural to think about everything in every possible variation. There weren’t separations like that, intellectually.” This bears out in LeWitt’s Artforum piece. He writes: “No matter what form it may finally have, it must begin with an idea.”
The exhibition continues across the street at Paula Cooper’s 521 West 21st Street location with selections of LeWitt’s earlier work. Minimalist, rectilinear structures—including a painted-wood grid resembling a blown-up tic-tac-toe board (from 1964), and a modular cubic construction of white-coated aluminum (1966/1968)—vary greatly from the ’80s and ’90s works, but LeWitt’s allegiance to conceptualism is clear. These pieces, similar to works of Judd and other minimalists, ask the viewer to consider their physicality in the light-filled space. They don’t so much stir emotion as invite you simply to look, an art form all its own.
“Sol was one of the freest, most generous-spirited artists I’ve ever met. He loved to work, and he wasn’t afraid. He’d try anything and everything,” Cooper says. The range of works in the show evince that spirit of experimentation and evolution. LeWitt found a way to square impermanence—with his wall drawings’ eventual erasure—with immortality. The pieces live on, as he does, in each new iteration. What could be a more fitting home for art like that than Cooper’s chapel reincarnate.
“Sol LeWitt: Drawings & Structures” is open now through October 22 at 521 & 534 West 21st Street.