Lawrence Weiner /USA/ - TAKEN FROM THE WIND & BOLTED TO THE GROUND 19.05.2010 - 19.06.2010

It is a great honour for us to invite you to our exhibition in May and June, presenting Lawrence Weiner, the key personality of the world conceptual movement. Lawrence Weiner (1942) was one of those three New York artists who dared formulate a new kind of art - the conceptual art, in the late 1960s. He tried several kinds of a new articulation of images, objects or body action in the course of the 1960s, but he finally understood in 1968 that his art would be, in terms of programme, a mere language formulation. Thanks to his experience with some installations he came to understand that his legacy could be optimally articulated by language, which made it possible to exclude specific material characteristics or facts, and to formulate a generally definite situation, basically still of material nature at that time. Gradually, he, Robert Barry and Sol LeWitt became the founders of a new kind of artistic statement. Weiner first formulated them in his book Statements (1968) – they were processes or their results at that time. However, he gradually enriched his work by further verbalised situations, and then, in the course of time, he worked his way from exhibiting these written language formulations to much more complex possibilities of text installations. And gradually, until nowadays, he has been able to find an increasing extent of new contexts for his verbalised works – starting with the choice of a certain text for a particular space, over script types as far as subtle connotations mediated by colour. He also prepared an original installation for České Budějovice, in a way he has been accustomed to for a certain time, both in the English original and in Czech. This is a proof of how much he values the communication with his viewers and how much he regards them as real partners. Weiner’s work has been transforming gradually from a radical deliverance of its language formulation. He characterised, at the same time, the change of the artist’s standpoint by one of the first transformations - by his text, which is both a work and a new kind of manifesto: 1. The artist can realise his work. 2. The work can be realised (i.e. by someone else). 3. The work need not be created at all. All possibilities are equivalent and correspond to the artist’s intention. In the course of time, the artist’s decision about how to present his work became his part, and it was in this way that a certain extent of aesthetic evaluation could be applied, especially in installations or drawings, as well as in his unique author’s books accompanying the entire work of this artist, who was present at the beginning of a new tendency that influences art even nowadays including the youngest generation. Texts by Lawrence Weiner can be both intellectually provoking, comic, lyrical and sexy. They lead a line between a description and a metaphor, without settling down in one of these camps. They are works dealing with the endless diversification of physical and cultural phenomena. The artist views art as dealing with relationships between human beings and objects, and between objects and other objects related to human beings. It is a concept based on materials and their cohesion explaining why Weiner refers to his works based on language as to sculptures. The project with the title “Taken from the wind & Bolted to the ground / Odebráno větru & Přikováno k zemi”, which was prepared specifically for the modern art gallery in České Budějovice, will certainly be one of the greatest events of the exhibition season in our town. The exhibition was prepared in cooperation with the Czech Ministry of Culture, the Statutory Town of České Budějovice, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Prague and the Susanne Ottesen Copenhagen and Marian Goodman New York galleries, and is co-financed by the Region of South Bohemia. br> Special thanks go to the HOCH České Budějovice advertising company.