Originally paired with its red counterpart, the blue detail of Wall Drawing 725 references some of Sol LeWitt’s earliest serial pieces. These wall structures, appearing first in the early 1960s, consisted of rectangular canvases painted in an elemental color and wood blocks painted in contrasting or complementary hues. The artist strived to conflate the structures’ material topography with the perceptual obtrusions and recessions of the color fields.
Though LeWitt’s wall drawings reject physical depth, Wall Drawing 725 implies dimensionality through the same color relationships used in the wall structures. The artist played with the uniformity of the wall’s surface, inviting the viewer to read the successive squares as discrete layers or frames. As such, the squares take on negative and positive spatial qualities: the white border springs forward, circumscribing a window-like penetration in the center.