OKEY DOKEY KONRAD FISCHER is pleased to present Sol LeWitt and David Douard. LeWitt’s first exhibition at the Konrad Fischer Galerie was in 1968, while David Douard’s first exhibition with the gallery was in 2023. Generationally separated, juxtaposing these two artists highlights their shared interests and contrasting strategies, prompting a push pull
that takes each artist’s ideas into the future.
In Douard’s words:
I find the idea that my works are shown alongside those of Sol LeWitt very exciting. Beyond the opportunity to exhibit with an artist who has been a reference for me, I believe this encounter can speak to one of the most interesting aspects of art:
how two artists, who are drawn to similar concerns, can produce very different forms.
Choosing to speak simply about gesture and color—because it is a way of bringing a practice closer to the body and to life—could be enough. But beyond that, there is also line, structure, and, in filigree, cities and the organization of human society.
I work in a fairly instinctive way, gathering things that are close to me: texts, music, objects. Line is always present. It is what structures my gestures and brings different signs into accord. This is not the straight line of modernity, but a line that deteriorates, deviates. To speak of line is, for me, a way of speaking about the body, the city, and its language. LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #869 also calls modernity into question: the line is not straight, nor directly drawn according to precise measurement, but is instead fragile, traced by a body.
The works I created for this exhibition were made with Wall Drawing #869 in mind, and I hope they will open up its mean-ing. I believe that the ideas of language, structure, and society present in my pieces can resonate with LeWitt’s works.
David Douard (b. 1983, Perpignan) lives and works in Paris. His practice is grounded in language, which he treats as a mu-
table, circulating material. Drawing from literary, poetic, and vernacular sources—often shaped by the conditions of digital cul- ture—Douard transforms text into sculptural and spatial forms. Language enters his work as something unstable and embodied, reconfiguring exhibition space as a hybrid, collective environment marked by contamination, fragmentation, and affect.
Working primarily with sculpture and installation, and incorporating painting, text, and heterogeneous materials, Douard produces environments that appear provisional, damaged, or infected. His works often resemble prosthetic structures or com- promised bodies, where surfaces carry traces of writing, erosion, and interruption. Rather than representing digital culture, his practice registers its psychological and linguistic effects, treating the digital as an internalized condition rather than a visible system.
Emerging from a generation shaped by networked communication, Douard is frequently positioned adjacent to post-digital prac- tice, while remaining distinct from its technological or image-based tendencies.
Douard graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2011 and has taught at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy since 2022. His work has been presented internationally at institutions including UCCA Dune Art Museum, Qinhuangdao; Serralves Museum, Porto; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Fridericia- num, Kassel; Sculpture Center, New York; and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and has featured in major biennials such as the Lyon, Taipei, Gwangju, and Belgrade Biennials. He was a fellow at the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici (2017–18), and received the Fondazione Ettore Fico Prize in 2017. His works are held in prominent public and private collections, including ICA Miami; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; Collection Pinault, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; and CNAP, Paris.
Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) was a central figure in the development of Conceptual Art and played a decisive role in redefining artistic practice in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to the expressive and gestural approaches associated with Abstract Expressionism and the New York School of the 1950s, LeWitt advanced an art grounded in structure, logic, and systematic thought.
For LeWitt, the idea constituted the core of the work. This distinction between conception and realization challenged traditional notions of authorship, shifting emphasis from the singular art object to process, instruction, and method. Using the cube as a
“grammatical device,” his work developed through systematic investigations of form, line, and color, culminating in the open- grid structures and wall drawings that became emblematic of his practice.
LeWitt’s association with Konrad Fischer Galerie began in 1968, marking the start of a long-standing professional and intellec- tual relationship with the gallery and its founder, Konrad Fischer. Over subsequent decades, LeWitt and Fischer maintained an extensive correspondence, frequently exchanging postcards that documented their ongoing dialogue about art, exhibitions, and ideas. This sustained exchange reflects the close alignment between LeWitt’s conceptual approach and Fischer’s role in shaping the European reception of Minimal and Conceptual art. The postcard correspondence now forms part of the Konrad Fischer Archive, held in Düsseldorf by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
LeWitt’s work has been the subject of major museum exhibitions internationally, including early presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Kunsthalle Bern, as well as comprehensive retrospectives organized by institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the Tate, London; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggen- heim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Dia:Beacon; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. In 2008, MASS MoCA inaugurated Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, a long-term installation that will remain on view through 2033.
