Five Modular Units occupies a decisive position within Sol LeWitt’s oeuvre: the work’s simplified components were a starting point for the artist to conceive increasingly complex aggregate structures. While the cubes are reductive in format, their size and scale—sixty-three inches high, or approximately eye level for many viewers—presaged a new direction in the artist’s work, toward more monumental forms. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, LeWitt designed elaborate cubic units that he then configured into numerous combinations and permutations, usually by means of mathematical calculations, and he frequently repeated identical forms in a serial format. As he noted, “The most interesting characteristic of the cube is that it is relatively uninteresting. . . . It is best used as a basic unit for any more elaborate function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed.”

Finding creative possibilities within tight instructional parameters, LeWitt frequently remarked that many of his works would be equally powerful had they been made by others. In fact, many of them are, including his architecturally scaled Wall Drawings, which begin as a set of instructions created by LeWitt and are executed by other artists and students, resulting in slight variations based on the site and the process of installation. Wall Drawing 121A, drawn by LeWitt himself, was included in Storm King’s 1972 exhibition Painting and Sculpture. 

As seen in Five Modular Units, LeWitt restricted his sculptural output to austere materials—wood or steel—and employed neutral colors, usually white enamel, to achieve a cool, impersonal, industrial look. Describing his artistic process, LeWitt explained, “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”