Eva LeWitt

The New York sculptor Eva LeWitt’s primarily abstract work often manifests as site-specific installation. She addresses the sculptural concerns of weight and volume and plays with the tension between industrial and hand fabrication. Using soft and pliable, semitransparent and semiabsorptive materials—including acetate, latex, and sponge—LeWitt subtly renders variations in tone. Alongside these formal investigations, she explores the expressive properties of light, both in the works themselves and in the spaces they inhabit.

Untitled (Flora) continues these lines of inquiry and pushes the representational possibilities for abstraction. Creating plantlike structures, the artist responds to the new flower arrangements that are installed on the windowsills of the lobby each week, acknowledging the room’s main function as a reception space. This domestic touch reflects the Warburg Mansion’s history as a family home and brings a note of hospitality to the visitor’s experience. In LeWitt’s installation, this gesture explodes across as much surface area as possible, fashioning the lobby into a synthetic terrarium.

This new work echoes the rarely seen Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) wall drawings that are part of the Jewish Museum collection. (The influential Minimalist artist is Eva LeWitt’s late father.) His Wall Drawing #926 Loopy (yellow and purple) and Wall Drawing #927 Loopy (green and blue) are permanently installed on the second floor, hidden behind the museum’s ever-changing exhibitions. Their bright colors and curvilinear lines are unlike the work he is most known for—monochromatic and rigidly geometric drawings and sculpture. Rather, their playfulness finds new resonance in Eva LeWitt’s engagement with the museum as site.

Eva LeWitt was born in 1985 in Spoleto, Italy. She lives and works in New York.

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About Lobby Artist Commissions

Since 2013, artists from around the globe have been invited to create new art or adapt a work for placement in the entrance lobby. The project builds upon Using Walls, a 1970 exhibition of commissioned artworks installed both within and beyond the gallery space of the Museum’s Warburg Mansion. That series, curated by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, began with the premise that the wall is not just a surface on which to display a work of art, but can be a component of it. Among the participating artists were Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Richard Tuttle, Mel Bochner, and Richard Artschwager.

The exhibition series is organized by Kelly Taxter, the Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum.