For an exhibit at the ICA Philadelphia entitled "Sol LeWitt: New Work (Black and Colors)", LeWitt designed four new wall drawings, each featuring stripes of all the primary and secondary colors and irregular black forms. LeWitt referred to these forms as "blobs" a term that recalls science fiction or comic books. Many art historians and critics also link the blob form to Henri Matisse's cut-outs. Although these organically shaped forms appear to be uncharacteristic for LeWitt, they epitomize his belief that "to be truly objective one cannot rule anything out. All possibilities include all possibilities without pre-judgement or post-judgement."
The blob wall drawings also exemplify another change in LeWitt’s wall drawings: the introduction of secondary colors (orange, violet, and green) into LeWitt’s color palette, which had been previously limited to gray, yellow, red, and blue. The artist's expansion of his color palette occurred when he began to use paint rather than ink washes. In the latter medium he had worked only in the four basic colors used for printing, layering them to create a variety of hues. His adoption of the three secondary colors was based on the hues created by the secondary colors that the ink layering produced.
The contrast between the vertical colored stripes and the amorphous blob in each of the wall drawings is intensified by LeWitt’s use of matte and glossy varnishes.
(Massachusettes Museum of Contemporary Art)
