Lawrence Weiner’s texts have appeared in all sorts of places over the last five decades, and although he sees himself as a sculptor rather than a conceptualist, he is among the trailblazers of the 1960s to present art as language. He defines his sculptural medium simply as ‘language + the material referred to’ in the sense that language is a material for construction. While Weiner’s works exist only as language and can be displayed in any form, he is closely involved in manifestations, detailing the size of the font, the surface texture and placement of the paint or vinyl letters and indeed often inventing new fonts. Texts appear on walls and windows of galleries and public spaces, as spoken word in audio recordings and video, printed books and posters, cast or carved objects, tattoos, graffiti, lyrics, online, ad infinitum.

Lawrence Weiner personalizes the artistic experience of each of his viewers. He believes that his job as the artist is to conceive an idea and possibly produce instructions, but it’s the audience who finishes the construction. Starting off as a key artist in the conceptual art movement of the 1960s, he wrote this infamous “statement of intent”, which dictates much of his work:
1. The artist may construct the piece.
2. The piece may be fabricated.
3. The piece need not be built.

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

Lawrence Weiner’s works are part of numerous international public collections, including Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Dia Beacon, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; British Museum, London; Institute of Chicago; Guggenheim Bilbao and many others.

Lawrence Weiner has been a leading figure in the art world for decades. Widely recognized as a pioneer of Conceptual art, his work uses language as its core material. Weiner investigates forms of display and distribution that challenge traditional assumptions about the nature of the art object, and taking it further, his work challenges a relationship of the viewer or to use his term, ‘receiver’ to the work.
His body of work has expanded on the potential for language to serve as sculpture. The subjects of his epigrammatic statements are often simple materials affected or effected by a process. Using language has allowed Weiner to play more with meaning within a cultural context, as in two of his early works from 1969, one about translation and the other about boundaries: A TRANSLATION FROM ONE LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER and THE JOINING OF FRANCE GERMANY AND SWITZERLAND BY ROPE. Weiner has frequently designed his work to be presented in a variety of local languages (e.g. Modern Arabic and Modern Hebrew) as well as English. Here in Tel-Aviv, that fact endows his show with a universal dimension when placed within a core political context: it’s presence, it’s fact accumulates more and more impact with time. Weiner has also developed his work over the years creating inflections of meaning with punctuation, shape, gesture and the interactions of color.
Whether in the context of art or in the broader context of cities and landscapes, his texts create a multi-inspirational performance of humanism. His unique “handwriting,” recognizable and anonymous at once, maintains a genuine materialism in a world of art that is becoming increasingly focused on objects. As such, Weiner’s work is contemporaneous in ways that appear to transcend the needs of future generations.