Craig Starr Gallery is pleased to announce Phong H. Bui and Sol LeWitt, on view from July 17 through October 4, 2025. The show brings together a selection of Bui’s recent meditation works and portrait drawings alongside sculpture, drawings, and photographs by LeWitt. Although their art could be described in antithetical terms–Bui’s work associated with ritual and the body, LeWitt’s linked to conceptual art and the mind–this exhibition explores their shared concern with process and the values of community and democracy.

Both artists propose a conception of drawing as the realization of a plan within which irregularity and imperfection can take place. In Three-part drawing using three colors in each part, LeWitt preselected the direction, layering, and color of the lines to create a drawing filled with understated variations. In Geometric figures within geometric figures, LeWitt chose and ordered six geometric figures (circle, square, triangle, rectangle, trapezoid, and parallelogram), and methodically presented all possible combinations of each figure within one another. Bui’s works are similarly conditioned by the physical and conceptual parameters of his meditation practices. His paintings and drawings are constrained by the preselected type of pencil or paint and his standard paper sizes; they are also limited by specific durations and progressions. As art historian Charles Duncan explains, “Each portrait drawing is completed through a controlled ritual that is afforded eight to twelve hours; abstract pencil drawings take between five-and-a-half and twenty-two hours. His meditation paintings are conceived and executed methodically as a group of up to twenty works in which colored pigments are applied simultaneously and in order, ascending step-by-step to completion.”1 The tension between idea and execution underscores both artists’ aspiration to engage the rational and the irrational, the calculated and the personal, as complementary halves of the creative process.

Both artists use networks to highlight their commitment to values of community and democracy. Bui arranges his meditation paintings and portrait drawings as grids, referring to them as symphonies which aim to capture how “each [part] exercises his or her inner freedom through the uniqueness of their instruments… Even though there are differences among the sounds, each is treated as equally important. Hence our concept of equality is also being celebrated.”2 Bui’s ideals resonate with the pre-set plans and modular arrangements LeWitt used to create his works. As LeWitt wrote, “The grid equalizes the spacing and makes all of the pieces and spaces between of equal importance.”3 “The ink drawing is a plan for but not a reproduction of the wall drawing; the wall drawing is not a reproduction of the ink drawing. Each is equally important.”4 The systems used by both artists speak to their shared desire to grant equal value to every aspect of their artworks, avoiding making any element or material intrinsically superior to another, and creating an equality of vision.

This exhibition is accompanied by the online publication of an essay by Alexander Nagel, the Craig Hugh Smyth Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His publications include Anachronic renaissance (2010), Medieval modern (2012), Amerasia (2023), and The scales of european painting (forthcoming).

Notes

1 Charles Duncan, “Democratic visages: portrait drawings and meditation paintings of Phong Bui,” in Phong H. Bui: symphonies and meditations (New York: Craig Starr Gallery, 2025), n.p.
2 Bui quoted in Charles Duncan, Democratic visages, n.p.
3 Sol LeWitt, “Serial project No.1 (ABCD),” in Sol LeWitt (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1978), p. 171. Reprinted from Aspen magazine, n. 5-6, 1966.
4 Sol LeWitt, “Wall drawings,” in Sol LeWitt, p. 169. Reprinted from Arts magazine, New York, April 1970.