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Sol LeWitt's 'Structures' Rise in City Hall Park

By Julie Shapiro | April 19, 2011 11:55am | Updated on April 19, 2011 12:43pm

By Julie Shapiro

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

LOWER MANHATTAN — A new public art exhibit in City Hall Park doesn't officially open until next month, but it's already capturing the attention of people passing by.

Two enormous concrete pyramids have begun rising in the park: a tall, narrow one on the plaza near the Brooklyn Bridge and a shorter, wider one on the lawn near Broadway. They will be part of the first-ever outdoor retrospective of artist Sol LeWitt's work, dubbed "Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2006."

The exhibit, sponsored by the Public Art Fund, will include many sculptures that have never been displayed together and some that have never been shown in the United States.

The show will feature pieces from LeWitt's modular, serial, geometric and irregular structures series. LeWitt was a leader of the minimalism and conceptualism movements and also worked in other media, including photography and paper. He had a gallery on the Lower East Side where he produced work in the late 1970s and he died in New York in 2007 at the age of 78.

Nicholas Baume, the Public Art Fund's director and chief curator, said in a statement that City Hall Park is a fitting location for a major survey of LeWitt's work.

"While LeWitt’s regular, often white forms contrast with the organic, picturesque park setting, they resonate strongly with the surrounding Manhattan grid and the stepped profiles of its signature skyscrapers," Baume said.

"The later work, with its application of irregular forms, complements the vocabulary of more recent architecture, including Frank Gehry’s undulating new addition to the precinct, Beekman Tower."

The City Hall Park exhibit opens May 24 and will run through Dec. 2.