BERLIN.- Blain|Southern Berlin announced an exhibition of new work by Lawrence Weiner, CONCENTRICITY PER SE. Directly responding to the gallery's vast, post-industrial space, which formerly housed the printing presses of Der Tagesspiegel newspaper, Weiner has created a large-scale wall installation utilising his primary medium of language.

The new works, in both English and German, draw into question the relationship between sculptural form, signification and meaning. They are accompanied by a number of drawings and diagrams, demonstrating the creative process and working methods involved in the artist’s practice.

Weiner has an ongoing relationship with Berlin, beginning in the early 1970s. He received a DAAD grant in 1975, and produced his movie, A SECOND QUARTER, in Berlin (A FIRST QUARTER was produced in 1973 in New York City). His opera, THE SOCIETY ARCHITECT PONDERS THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE, was performed at the Hamburger Bahnhof in 2000 and in the same year, his exhibition, NACH ALLES, was held at the Deutsche Guggenheim.

Weiner’s art career began in 1960 in Mill Valley, California, where he set off dynamite charges that had been placed in a field. Since then Weiner has been an explorer of materials and their relationships with people and society. In his 1968 Declaration of Intent, Weiner made explicit his reappraisal of the traditional relationship between artist and materials, which coincided with a radical redefinition of the conventional positions of artist and audience.

Central to the development of post-minimal Conceptual art in the 1960s, Weiner challenged traditional assumptions about the status and nature of art. His praxis has taken many forms, including interventions with architectural structures, publishing materials within books and journals, and even writing song lyrics. His work fundamentally questions the configuration of the world around him. In doing so, Weiner offers a unique insight into the difficulties of ascribing fixed definitions and explanations, or perhaps even meaning, to both the practice of art-making and to the art object itself.

"CONCENTRICITY PER SE attempts to exist, not in parallel realities or in predetermined circles where causality is objectified, but in the graceful open-ended ellipse of concentricity, where anything can happen depending on one’s perception and the awareness of the moment. This collision is where the exhibition begins… " Alice Zimmerman, 2012