NEW YORK, NY.- Gladstone Gallery announced its representation of the Lawrence Weiner Estate in New York.
Recognized as a pioneering figure of Conceptual art, Lawrence Weiner is celebrated for his work with language, often in large-scale public installations and spanning film and video, posters, artist books, and audio. In graphic text-works that play with the tensions between simplicity and complexity, the roles of the artist and the audience, practice and theory, Weiner repeatedly demonstrated the pliability of words as an artistic medium, deploying a custom typeface–Margaret Seaworthy Gothic–to navigate the visual power of language to signify, evoke feeling, register protest, to be funny, joyful, pictorial, political, utilitarian, whimsical, angry, and transcendental, often all at once. Though Weiner preferred to identify as a sculptor, he was sometimes mistaken for a poet, but at the heart of the work is simply the never-finished attempt to grapple with meaning: “The only art I’m interested in,” Weiner once remarked, “is the art I don’t understand right away. If you understand it right away, it really has no use except as nostalgia.”
In announcing the representation of the Estate, Barbara Gladstone expressed “I feel incredibly grateful for this opportunity to work alongside the estate of Lawrence Weiner. He proposed a radically new relationship to art through his exploration of language as a sculptural medium. Representing the estate is a dream come true.”
Lawrence Weiner has been the subject of a major retrospective survey at the Whitney Museum, New York; MoCA, Los Angeles, and K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2007-2009). Other retrospectives have been shown at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico (2004); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2000); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA (1994); and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA (1990). Solo exhibitions include the Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2021); Fundación Casa Wabi, Oaxaca, Mexico (2020); Museo Nivola, Orani, Italy (2019); Milwaukee Art Museum (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2016); Blenheim Art Foundation, UK (2015); South London Gallery, UK (2014); Villa Panza, Italy, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2013); and the Jewish Museum, New York (2012). Weiner participated in Documenta 5, 6, 7, and 13 (1972, 1977, 1982, 2012); the 36th, 41st, 50th and 55th Venice Biennales, Italy (1972, 1984, 2003, 2013); and the 27th Biennale de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2006).
The artist was the recipient of major honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1983), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1995), a Skowhegan Medal for Painting/Conceptual Art (1999), an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Graduate Center, CUNY (2013), the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Prize (2015), and the Wolf Prize and the Aspen Award for Art (2017).
