Lawrence Weiner, a fine artist born in 1940, has an incredible job: he designs museum displays that are stark, bold and simple.
Lawrence Weiner’s exhibit, A Wall Pitted by a Single Air rifle Shot, on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan.
His work is on display at the big museums. The Hirschhorn Sculpture Gallery, one of the many Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., features his work, “Rubber Ball Thrown on the Sea” and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City has his work, “A Wall Pitted by a Single Air Rifle Shot” on display.
These works are very large typographic works, applied to otherwise undecorated walls. The Hirschhorn Gallery work is painted directly on the wall. I couldn’t get close enough to the MOMA display to determine if it’s painted or made of vinyl lettering.
Rubber Ball Thrown on the Sea, is installed at the Hirschhorn Sculpture Gallery in Washington, D.C. The letters are over two feet tall.
I attempted to figure out the exact font for these works using What They Font, but didn’t get them precisely. They are slightly compressed sans-serif news headline style fonts, devoid of ink-traps, displaying simple “headlines” with Weiner’s messages.
Weiner is considered a “conceptual artist.” His works have been shown in many museums and galleries around the world. Many are typographic in nature, some are more “conceptual.” At the MOMA, Weiner has a work which involved removing a 36-inch square of sheetrock from the museum wall. That’s it.
Forgive my cynicism. I like his typographic work. I just wonder how one gets paid to have a museum remove the wall board from the gallery wall and give the artist credit for it.
