artist profile
Lawrence Weiner
born
1942
lives and works
New York, USA
about the artist
Lawrence Weiner’s text-based works have indelibly shaped the evolution of Conceptual Art since its inception in the late 1960s. His primary mode of expression is the wall installation manifested in the form of language. Embedded in this language are neutral descriptions and instructions of fabrication procedures, gestures, material structures that can only be fully realized through the act of looking performed by the viewer. Weiner champions the egalitarian purpose of art as a means of enriching lives through a presentation that communicates without necessitating (or might even be hindered by) contextual information or physical production. For his radically groundbreaking work, Weiner has been honored with many accolades, among them two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1976 and 1983 respectively, the Arthur Kopcke Prize in 1991, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994, and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 1995. The artist has held many notable solo exhibitions all over the world, at sites such as the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., USA; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, USA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA; the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Germany; the Tate Gallery in London, UK; and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China. A large retrospective, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE, traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, USA, over the years 2007 and 2009.