Lawrence Weiner

The Children's Aid Society's Art Auction Benefit, New York, 27 April 2004

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Drawing was integral to and at the origin of the entire production of Lawrence Weiner, a pioneering figure in the Conceptual art movement. Central to Weiner’s drawings and sculpture was his use of language as material, a practice rooted in his belief that words are accessible to the general public. But language is slippery and assigning meaning is an immersive task as the New York Times' Randy Kennedy explained in his tribute to the artist at the occassion of his 2021 passing. Kenny stated that "If his work was sometimes hard to get a handle on, even willfully abstruse, he said it was because he himself was grappling messily with meaning, which he considered an artist’s fundamental reason for existing." (Randy Kennedy, "Lawrence Weiner, Artist Whose Medium Was Language, Dies at 79," The New York Times, 7 December 2021, p. 10). Reflecting on the misinterpretation of the arrangement of words and graphic marks throughout his practice as a story, Weiner explained, “Other people read it as a narrative, but I make work that is not a metaphor. People can use my work to build a metaphor for themselves to understand their place in the world.” (Lawrence Weiner, quoted in Thom Bettridge, "2232 Words With Conceptual Art Icon Lawrence Weiner," Highsnobiety, 2021 (online)).

Rather than a homogeneous body of works, Lawrence Weiner's drawings fall into three groups. The first early group of conceputal works included hashmarks document an activity, abstracted tv test patterns, statements of a concept or free variation lines on graph paper exercising that both can be treated equally in the medium of drawing. The second type of drawings encompassed arrangements of words and symbols resulting in large scale installations on architecture, sidewalks and museum walls. Finally, Weiner's drawings functioned in a third way resulting in "the act of drawing itself” (Donna DeSalvo, Lawrence Weiner: As far as the eye can see, New York, 2007, p. 71) Shifts of meaning, an essential part of Weiner’s practice, both suggest and subvert reading the drawing as a little story in this third and most rare group of works on paper exemplified in Untitled (Little Star), 2004.