It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to Lawrence Weiner (b. 1942 in New York), one of the most prominent American conceptualist artists who started their international career in the late 1960s in New York. Throughout his practice Weiner pursued inquiries into language and the artwork–viewer relationship.
He employed words as mediators of visual meaning, transforming his ideas and thinking into inscriptions that would crop up in the most unusual of places, such as on book covers, stickers and walls of buildings, where art is not expected to be seen.
SOME SAND + SOME HEAT refers to the glass-making tradition in Lorraine (France) and was originally put on a local glass factory’s chimney. The statement’s arbitrariness turns into a game for viewers who consider the work and try to understand it by searching their memory for hidden symbolic meanings and cultural references.
