“I am personally most inspired by touch and feel, how materials will react with one another”: The Minimalist Installations of Sculptor Eva LeWitt

© Eva LeWitt, Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and VI, VII, Oslo. Photographs courtesy Bill Ganzel, Ganzel Group Communications, Inc.

By Jonathan Orozco November 10, 2024

Residents in Omaha, Nebraska have been anticipating the re-opening of the Art Deco-era Joslyn Art Museum after it closed in May 2022 for a two year expansion. In September, the museum opened its doors with an additional 16,000 square feet of gallery space, designed by the Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta in partnership with the Omaha firm Alley Poyner Macchietto Architecture.

On September 10, the day of the opening, nearly one hundred people waited outside Joslyn's new north entrance. At exactly 1 pm, a staff person opened the doors, letting a swarm of people rush to the front desk to get their pink metal admission pins with the museum’s “J”. Up a winding staircase, you’re greeted by a pinocchio sculpture by Jim Dine, among other postmodernist paintings and sculptures.  

New York artist Eva LeWitt is among the three inaugural artists with solo-shows at the museum, alongside Omaha-born Ed Ruscha and French Clément Cogitore.

LeWitt, though born in Spoleto, Italy, was raised in Chester, Connecticut. She is the daughter of the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, who moved to Italy in the 1980s to get away from New York. After graduating from Bard College in 2007, she worked with artist Tom Sachs for four years and then worked with the sculptor Tara Donovan for another eight. 

Walking to the show, visitors see highlights from Joslyn's permanent collection, like works by Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt.

Titled after the artist’s name, the exhibition is a series of modular sculptures that grew from a 2022 exhibition at Luhring Augustine. LeWitt is now toying with how grids can be used to create volume with two-dimensional materials. 

© Eva LeWitt, Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and VI, VII, Oslo. Photographs courtesy Bill Ganzel, Ganzel Group Communications, Inc.

“These pieces are made using square silicone cord and round steel beads,” LeWitt says. “Quite a lot of physics went into choosing these two materials – getting them to work in conjunction with one another, and also in relation to the larger shapes that they would end up illustrating. Not real science but finding the right weight-per-mass ratio that results in the perfect amount of density, allowing just the right amount of negative space to become incorporated into the final representation. I wanted to go for a really unexpected color palette, because I wanted to be surprised by the way the colors of the silicone would ‘mix’ as they overlap one another.”

During an initial site visit at Joslyn with exhibition curator Karin Campbell, LeWitt made do with having no lighting. 

“We couldn't get the lights on because we were working on electrical in the [museum’s] Scott Pavilion”, Campbell says. “She had her cell phone flashlight out to look at the ceiling and the corners examining every inch of the space, not just the walls and the floors. At that point, I was really excited because I thought if she's looking at the ceilings, it means that she wants to engage the space in a different kind of way.”

Walking into the gallery space, you see column-like sculptures suspended from the ceiling. 

"I am personally most inspired by touch and feel, how materials will react with one another, how they will bend and behave under certain conditions," LeWitt says.

Her works are similar to the late Venezuelan sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto who also suspended bands of material in his pieces. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a 1990 piece titled Penetrable on display for over half a decade, which welcomed people to walk through and experience it by touch. It went viral via a short video on the now-defunct platform Vine calling it the “ramen noodle exhibit.”

LeWitt’s works are also aesthetically modernist, with strong material relationships to sculptor Kiah Celeste.  

Each strand in each sculpture almost looks like quipu, which are knotted bands of thread that have been used to record numerical information by Indigenous people in South America for thousands of years. Though likely unintentional, each work acts as a bundle of these knotted threads, but rather than being archival records, LeWitt’s sculptures are purely visual. 

© Eva LeWitt, Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and VI, VII, Oslo. Photographs courtesy Bill Ganzel, Ganzel Group Communications, Inc.

As visually perfect as they look, they rely heavily on the artist's hands. In fact, these works are drafted on paper. 

From a distance, the bottoms appear like geometric shapes, skewed rectangles, pyramids, cones or other mathematically graphed functions. 

“It requires so much precision,” Campbell said. “There's precision in the making and cutting of the silicone strands to exact length. She adjusted every single sculpture on her own - pulling a strand here, trimming one there, making sure that when your eye lines up with these metallic balls, that you are having a very clear perspective of what that shape is.”

Outside of the CAP gallery, the Joslyn also acquired three similar pieces by LeWitt and has them on display in the newly built Rhonda & Howard Hawks Pavilion. All black, one piece has gold beads, the other has silver, and the third, a mix of the two. WM