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101
Lawrence Weiner, THE GRACE OF GESTURE, 2010

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In 1969, the US artist Lawrence Weiner ushered in a turning point in art with three statements:

  1. The artist may construct the piece.
  2. The piece may be fabricated.
  3. The piece need not be built.

The idea that concept and idea are as important as the work itself resonated with a politicized generation after 1968. At the beginning of the 1960s, Minimal Art had opposed Abstract Expressionism, with its radical reduction to basic geometric forms, industrial materials, serial arrangements, and the renunciation of personal authorship. The aim was an objective, space-related art. Yet by then, the purity of this approach had hardened. Artists sought to leave studios and galleries behind, to move away from traditional artworks into society, into public and social space. In this context, text, concept, form, and graphic design played a decisive role.

Weiner’s work in the Rotunda is titled THE GRACE OF A GESTURE. “Grace” can signify mercy or elegance, but also a form of generosity. “Gesture” may be tactile, symbolic, or interper- sonal. Weiner’s work is all of these at once—not a fixed object, but a “communication system.” It can be printed and “translated” into different languages, spaces, and experiences. In 2013, on the occasion of an exhibition of the Written Art Collection as part of the Venice Biennale, Weiner had this work translated into the most widely spoken international languages among the city’s international visitors. Transparent foils were mounted on water buses and traveled across the canals. What emerged was a temporary, conceptual form of poetry. For brief moments, it encompassed the entire city: the light, the water, the people, the writing, the languages, the colors, the places, and chance.

Lawrence Weiner’s work opens the exhibition Seeing Words, Reading Images. For its presentation at the PalaisPopulaire, the work was translated into the ten languages of the artists participating in the exhibition: Arabic, Chinese, German, English, Farsi, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Polish, and Turkish.

Audio

Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.


Lawrence Weiner, THE GRACE OF GESTURE, 2010
Language + the materials referred to
© Lawrence Weiner Estate/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2026. Photo: Mathias Schormann
Written Art Collection

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