Lawrence Weiner (b. 1942, New York, USA) lives and works in New York and Amsterdam. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Weiner investigated forms of display and distribution that challenge traditional assumptions about the nature of the art object. Since the 1970s Weiner’s wall installations consist solely of words in a lettering painted on walls. Although this body of work focuses on the potential for language to serve as an art form, the subjects of his epigrammatic statements are often materials, or a physical action or process. In the succeeding decades, Weiner explored the interaction of punctuation, shapes, and color to serve as inflections of meaning for his texts.

Selected solo exhibitions include Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; BAK, Utrecht; K21 Kunstsammlung im Ständehaus, Düsseldorf; Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin (all 2008), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007), Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (2004), and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2001). Recent group exhibitions include FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2009), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2009), and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2009), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2008), and Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto (2008). Weiner received several awards including the Skowhegan Medal for Painting/Conceptual Art (1999), the Wolfgang Hahn Prize (1995), the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1994) and the Arthur Kopcke Prize of the Arthur Kopcke Memorial Fund (1991).