Untitled,

1977, printed 1995

LeWitt’s series <em>Brick Wall</em> consists of thirty views of the title subject, identical in perspective but varying with respect to lighting. The artist, whose work often makes use of grids, series, and cubic forms, remarked that this shoddily mortared wall, visible from his window at home, "changes each time I see it and has a constant beauty no matter when seen." Each photograph in the series, viewed alone, presents a bald, forbidding image of stasis. But when the images are juxtaposed (even, as here, so few as two at a time), the banal plainness of the subject cues the viewer to focus on the only variable in sight: light itself. In this pairing, the wall is seen at left in a raking light that emphasizes small and large-scale irregularities in its surface, and on the right in a flat glare that draws a hard shadow around nearly every brick. <em>Brick Wall</em> was executed the year before LeWitt’s mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He conceived the series as a book to sell at a New York shop he cofounded, Printed Matter, where the multiples and publications of Conceptual artists found a more congenial venue than in traditional art galleries.