Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam Announces New Work by Lawrence Weiner

AMSTERDAM.- The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam announces the acquisition of SCATTERED MATTER BROUGHT TO A KNOWN DENSITY WITH THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD / CUSPED (2007) by American artist Lawrence Weiner (b. New York, 1942) as a gift to the museum’s collection from the Association of Friends of the Stedelijk Museum.

The work will debut as part of The Temporary Stedelijk at the Stedelijk Museum—the upcoming interim program in the Stedelijk Museum’s renovated historic building that opens to the public on 28 August 2010—and will remain on view indefinitely.

US artist Lawrence Weiner poses in front of a tram he has inscribed with the sentence 'A line drawn from the first star of dusk to the last star of dawn' in German as well as English, in Duesseldorf, Germany. As Conceptual artist, Weiner became internationally known for his language artworks consisting of short, mostly puzzling sentences. EPA/FREDERICO GAMBARINI

One of the central figures associated with the emergence and foundations of Conceptual art in the 1960s, Lawrence Weiner remains one of the most significant artists working today. Weiner‘s work consists of language plus the materials referred to, wherein language is also considered a sculptural material. The conditions of a work of art have been the basis of Weiner‘s practice since 1967. His ―STATEMENT OF INTENT,‖ an often-quoted declaration associated with the foundations of Conceptual art first published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition January 5–31, 1969, organized by Seth Siegelaub in New York (appearing subsequently in slightly revised forms), remains at the core of his practice. The ―STATEMENT OF INTENT‖ is as follows:

1. THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK.
2. THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED.
3. THE WORK 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.

Weiner‘s employment of language is purposely open-ended to allow for translation, transference, and transformation by the receiver; each time the work is made, it is made anew. Not fixed in time and place, every manifestation and point of reception of the work is different; each person will use the work differently and find a different relationship to its content.

As Stedelijk Museum director Ann Goldstein has written in the catalogue accompanying the artist‘s 2007 retrospective exhibition, “The relationship of human beings to objects remains at the core of Weiner‘s practice and is bound in those relationships with materials, whether physically present as fabricated objects or materially present as language. In all of its potential conditions of receivership, Weiner‘s work, whether manifested on the floor of his studio, on the walls of an exhibition space, on a page of a book, or in the mind of the spectator, produces an engagement with the culture at large—every time anew. In so doing he offers us the remarkable opportunity to consider our own relationships with objects and our culture, to participate in the production of meaning, and, ultimately, to consider how, we too, can reconfigure, as the artist has stated, our ‘understanding of the way we stand in relation to our place in the sun.‘”

This major acquisition was initiated by former Stedelijk Museum Director Gijs van Tuyl, who worked closely with the artist to select and site the work. Funding for the purchase has been generously provided by the Friends of the Stedelijk Museum, who made this major donation in anticipation of the museum‘s grand reopening. The work will be situated in a large gallery (formerly the restaurant) in the historical building of the Stedelijk Museum in dynamic dialogue with the Karel Appel mural from 1956. It will be presented as part of the museum‘s upcoming program The Temporary Stedelijk at the Stedelijk Museum, which opens to the public on 28 August 2010, and it will remain on view indefinitely.

This recent acquisition joins 79 works by Weiner in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum (among them, 58 artist‘s books), including AN OBJECT MADE TO RESEMBLE ANOTHER BY THE ADDITION OF A SUFFICIENT QUANTITY OF EXTERNAL QUALITIES (1988) on a bronze plaque on the façade of the museum building.

Weiner lives and works in New York City and Amsterdam. The Stedelijk Museum is privileged to have had a long relationship with artist, whose work was first shown at the museum in the legendary group exhibition ―Op Losse Schroeven‖ in 1969. In 1988, the museum organized the major retrospective exhibition ―What is Set Upon the Table Sits Upon the Table‖, co-curated by Wim Beeren and Marja Bloem. Stedelijk Museum director Ann Goldstein co-curated (with Donna de Salvo) Weiner‘s first retrospective exhibition to originate in the United States, ―Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE‖, which was co-organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2007.

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