Autodidact, American artist Lawrence Weiner died in New York, Thursday, December 2, at the age of 79.
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Born February 10, 1942 in New York in the South Bronx district, American artist Lawrence Weiner died in the same city, Thursday, December 2, at the age of 79. He had done in 2020 state of his fight against cancer. His name has long been enrolled in the history of the art of the second half of the XX e as that of one of the main protagonists of conceptual art, in the same way as Joseph Kosuth.
Autodidact in artistic matters, Weiner told in 2019 to have been seized by the vision, at the MOMA, of the work of Alberto Giacometti the palace at 4 o’clock in the morning. According to another of his stories, in 2013, not being derived from a bourgeois family, his first report to the art would have passed through the words on the walls:
“The art, it was wall inscriptions or messages. I grew up in a city where I read the walls; I always read them.”
No doubt this reconstitution of a vocation is it too perfect. She says, however, most of the artistic practice of Weiner: from 1969, her material is not painting or volumes but languages and writing.
Crater dug by explosions of TNT
Before this resolution, on which it is returned, Weiner travel across the United States, from 1960, as far as Arctic and California where he realizes what he considers as his first exhibition: Craters dug by TNT explosions in Mill Valley National Park, near San Francisco. Back in New York, in 1964, it manifests its refusal of painting by its series of Propeller Paintings, which show a fireplace in various formats and according to various processes. He presents them in the Gallery of Seth Siegelaub this same year. Without success.
The Removals series, started soon after, is just as ironic with regard to the paint: Weiner cuts a rectangle into a canvas, painted it uniformly at the bomb and ties two bands up and down. The process is rudimentary but especially released from any decision of the artist since the choice of the format and the color is given to the recipient of the canvas. According to the same principle of strict minimalist reduction, in April 1968, Weiner, invited with Robert Barry and Carl Andre for a collective exhibition at the Windham College in Vermont, sticks to an installation he entitled, in accordance with his material definition. , Staples, Stakes, Twine, Turf (staples, stakes, rope, grass) and draws an incomplete grid. Students, little by minimalism, destroy it.
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