BERLIN.- AJLART presents an exhibition with works by the artists Ian Hamilton Finlay, Robert Montgomery and Lawrence Weiner at Potsdamerstr. 98a, 2nd courtyard, 10785 Berlin.

With Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), Lawrence Weiner (*1942) and Robert Montgomery (*1971), the current exhibition brings together three positions of conceptual art for which language is central as a material and artistic means. Artistic work using language is linked to fundamental questions regarding the recording thereof from the outset, and consequently also to questions of intelligibility, whichever form that may take – for like music, language is inherently ephemeral. An artistic approach to language is therefore also always an approach to signs and their positioning, meaning the shape of signs in the locations and the areas where language occurs. This concerns the handling of legibility and representation, the question of comprehensibility as well as the rendition of contents within the framework of cultural contexts.

Across three generations, Finlay, Weiner and Montgomery share a preoccupation with the potential of language, as the elementary core of a work, to appear completely conventional, but also to radically break with convention. In its blatant brevity, the "Declaration of Intent", published by Lawrence Weiner in 1968, left the question of the materialisation of the work open, or rather, handed it over to the viewer. Nevertheless, Weiner also focuses on the creation of a distinct typograhy. This constitutes a universally applicable semiotic system, which he developed in keeping with his sculptural understanding of working with language, and was prominently installed in public space repeatedly.

In contrast to Weiner, the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay's work is marked by his background in concrete poetry, which gave him cause to found "Wild Hawthorn Press" in 1961, where he published his poetic texts and prints. A few years later, in 1966, he began working on "Little Sparta", a garden in the tradition of English landscape design in the late 18th century, with philosophical and political ideas embedded in the artfully cultivated and idealised nature of its grounds, ideas which often run counter to the current ideologies or social order. As such, the English landscape-garden functions not only as actually tangible painting, is at the same time a medium of subversive opposition. Finlay transfers this linking of formally aesthetic considerations and political discourse almost seamlessly into his genre-bending, multi-faceted work, attaining a contemporaneity with a range spanning from antiquity to the present.

Robert Montgomery's works reference our present day, which – in the interest of a capitalist economic order – has produced a 'consciousness industry' where the fulfillment of individual dreams and desires is depicted as completely guaranteed. It is precisely this propaganda and simulation of the promise of happiness that Montgomery addresses with poetically associative texts, which are for the most part temporarily installed in public space, their assertions not related to promises, but rather the existential wavering between dream and reality, between longing and failure, between hope and life.