In memory of Lawrence Weiner

In memory of Lawrence Weiner who passed away on 2 December: we feel his loss deeply, and celebrate him as a dear friend and a visionary. Our thoughts are with his family, in particular his wife Alice and his daughter Kirsten.

A true pioneer and a founding figure of Conceptual art, Lawrence Weiner established a new relationship between art and language. Working with words from the late 1960s onwards, he shifted the materiality of art onto language itself. Through evocative phrases and sentence fragments, his text-based installations invite viewers to project their own experience and form their own associations, underscoring the power of words as artistic media. In a radical restructuring of the traditional artist-viewer relationship, he shifted responsibility for the work's realisation to its audience, redefining standard systems of artistic distribution. The impact of his legacy, which spans five decades, can be felt worldwide.