RIDGEFIELD, CONN.- The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is presenting Eva LeWitt’s first solo museum exhibition, Untitled (Mesh A–J), debuting a new site-specific installation, the artist’s largest to date. LeWitt’s practice is informed by both the reductive systems, industrial materials, and geometric preoccupations of Minimalism and the performative activities of process art, as well as her own personal history and inimitable imagination. The exhibition will be on view until April 26, 2020.

Generating sculptures and installations that harmonize color, matter, and space, LeWitt favors materials that she can handle and maneuver alone in the studio: plastics, latex, fabrics, and vinyl—substances offered in an array of readymade colors and a variability of light absorbencies. Employing strategies of accretion and repetition, she customizes her work to comply and adjust to the surroundings of a particular setting.

Introducing a new material for her exhibition at The Aldrich, coated mesh, most commonly used for filters, window screens, and even protective clothing, LeWitt investigates its lightweight and light responsive crosshatched woven surface. The installation’s silhouette have been tailored to exploit and emphasize the proportions and contours of the Museum’s Leir Gallery, a nave-like rectilinear space with 16-foot-high ceilings and two small square windows that accent the long walls and provide the room with its only natural illumination. Depending on the hour and the season, the intensity of the sunlight hardens and lessens over the course of each day.

Spanning three of the four walls, LeWitt suspended from the ceiling nine cumulative layers, color fields of tensile mesh, forming interlacing moiré effects that swell and pulsate. At the gallery’s back end, a spherical curvature simulates an apse. This domed structure reverberates in nine smaller half-moon sweeps, radiating chapels, that open and close in succession out towards the room’s central core or choir. Thus, onlookers are enveloped in a womb of fluctuating ripples, emanating tinges of color and incandescence that travels with them. Its exaggerated scale and repeating and mutating shapes recall the work of Eva Hesse, most notably her sculpture Expanded Expansion (1969). Like Hesse, LeWitt’s sculptural environment feels as though it could contract and expand upon command.

Eva LeWitt (b. 1985, Spoleto, Italy) currently lives and works in New York, NY. She holds a BFA from Bard College, Annandaleon-Hudson, NY. Selected exhibitions include: Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2019); Untitled (Flora), The Jewish Museum, New York (2018); Spine: Madeline Hollander, Eva LeWitt, Ragen Moss, JOAN, Los Angeles (2018); Eva LeWitt, VI, VII, Oslo, Norway (2018); Eva LeWitt: Sculpture, Gallery One Twenty Eight, New York (2015).

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue, the artist’s first, which will include an essay by Amy Smith-Stewart.

Organized by Amy Smith-Stewart, Senior Curator, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum