Free Sol LeWitt

What does it mean for a museum to possess a work of art: what is actually owned? The Van Abbemuseum has invited the Danish artist collective, SUPERFLEX to work with the museum’s collection. It has responded with the exhibition In-between Minimalisms and a new work, FREE SOL LEWITT - an installation made specifically for Play Van Abbe, a programme of exhibitions and projects focussing on the museum of the 21st century. For *Play Van Abbe Part 2: Time Machines *SUPERFLEX proposed to curate an exhibition with art works from the collection that focus on seriality, repetition, recipes, instructions, production and action. This became the exhibition *In-between Minimalisms*. Minimal and Conceptual art works by Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Ian Wilson, Robert Morris, Ulrich Rückriem and Robert Ryman have been combined with ‘actions’ on video by John Baldessari, Martha Rosler and Bruce Nauman in order to emphasize the presence of the body action. In the centre of this collection display, SUPERFLEX has created a metal workshop in order to reproduce a work from the museum collection on site, and suggested sharing the copies among the general public for free. The choice fell on the work *Untitled (Wall Structure) *from 1972 by American artist Sol LeWitt. FREE SOL LEWITT is a homage to Sol LeWitt and the concepts that form the core of his work. Herewith SUPERFLEX moves our attention from the material object to production, presentation and distribution of an artwork and describes LeWitt’s work as a series of instructions and resources with which the museum can replicate this specific work from its collection and donate the replicas to its visitors. In this way SUPERFLEX shifts the emphasis from the artwork as an object of investment to the artwork as the result of a process and the underlying idea behind this. This publication gives an insight into SUPERFLEX’s concept of FREE SOL LEWITT, discusses some of the key issues arising out of the project and includes an extensive interview with SUPERFLEX and essays by Charles Esche, Christiane Berndes and Daniel McClean.