Eva LeWitt | Boston ICA

Art Exhibition |
Institute of Contemporary Art
25 Harbor Shore Drive
Boston MA 02210

03/20/22-10/23/22

Eva LeWitt’s vibrant handmade sculptures are fashioned from everyday commercial and industrial materials. She casts dyes and cuts these pliable soft and often synthetic materials before composing them in captivating arrangements of hanging geometric forms and gradations of undulating color. Her large-scale abstract artworks often recall domestic or theatrical decor such as curtains whose colors are meant to ”radiate heat” and ”generate energy” according to LeWitt. Just as curtains evoke an interplay between inside and outside—marking a boundary between public and private or alternatively revealing and concealing—LeWitt’s intuitive material arrangements play with unresolved tensions: between transparency and opacity gravity and weightlessness abstraction and decoration.

Conceived for the ICA’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall and structured by the particular shape of the museum’s architecture Untitled (Mesh Circles) is a monumental sculpture made of bands of colorful coated mesh fabric whose shifting linear composition creates a number of interlocking circular forms. While coated meshes have a variety of uses ranging from privacy screens to high-visibility workwear LeWitt transforms lengths of the tensile fabric into an unfolding environmental sculpture that intensifies the experience of space. As the crosshatched surface pattern and fields of color overlap and respond to ambient conditions like sunlight and circulating air a moire effect is produced: a shimmering pattern that occurs when two geometrically regular patterns are superimposed. Untitled (Mesh Circles) creates a dynamic and uplifting experience that vibrates throughout the museum’s interior.