Sol Lewitt’s Focus is one piece that particularly caught my attention. The piece, which is entirely black and white, is alarmingly massive. In fact, I walked past the exhibit while trying to find it, an act seemingly impossibly in retrospect.
Focus barely shared any qualities as the other MOMA exhibits. There was less color variety, shape variety, or “artistic skill” than in any other of the MOMA exhibits. The exhibit did give out a strong vibe like the rest of the pieces. It was different, though, in that most of the other pieces made me feel like there was a certain vibe I was supposed to be getting. When I went into the Focus: Sol LeWitt, as they call it, I felt like there was more room for open interpretation than in most of the other options we had to write about.
The piece was printed (or painted) onto two or three of the very high and very wide walls of the museum were pitch black, with white squiggles, lines, and curves. To the right of the exhibit, painted in white on the black wall, there was a zoomed out image of the paintings on the wall. It is hard to decide whether I prefer the massive version or the small one.
Above the zoomed out image was the “map key” of the exhibit. It showed that there were only 20 shapes used to create Focus. The final products were basically grids in which the shapes were inserted, sometimes two in one spot. On a larger scale, my first thought was that either it was a poor attempt at a maze or a jumble of random shapes. The latter may be close to correct, but when printed in a small enough size to see without stepping back, it was more aesthetically pleasing.
Sol Lewitt’s Focus was in some ways soothing, but at the same time almost empty. I think it was the dull, “brushed” as I like to say, black with thin white lines that created the soothing feeling. The walls were surprisingly easy on the eyes for something with such a large contrast in colors. The differing feeling of the large version compared to the small was unexpected. The lines, when put on a small scale, seemed tangled or congested. The small piece had a much more hectic mood.
On the wall with the “map key,” the design of the white lines was in a diagonal gesture. Most of the designs were moving vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. There were also a ton of dotted lines.
One of the other walls was filled with curves. For the most part, the lines were horizontal or vertical curves. A handful of times, the curves would reseal, making either an ellipses or a half-ellipses.