FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, July 15, 2016

Dia Art Foundation to Permanently Install Lawrence Weiner’s CADMIUM & MUD & TITANIUM & LEAD & FERROUS OXIDE & SO ON . . . (1991) on the Back Facade of Dia:Beacon

New York, NY – Dia Art Foundation announced today that Lawrence Weiner’s CADMIUM & MUD & TITANIUM & LEAD & FERROUS OXIDE & SO ON . . . (1991) will be hand painted onto the back facade of Dia:Beacon. This newly acquired work will be visible from the back lawn of the building as well as from the Metro-North Railroad trains that pass by the museum.

First created as a commission for Dia Center for the Arts in New York, CADMIUM & MUD & TITANIUM & LEAD & FERROUS OXIDE & SO ON . . . (1991) will be Weiner’s fourth installation at Dia:Beacon. Many of his works at Dia:Beacon activate spaces that extend beyond the traditional confines of the gallery, such as the café walls and the liminal space of a stairwell. This new piece will activate Dia:Beacon’s expansive back lawn, which has previously been inaccessible to visitors. Starting July 22, 2016, visitors will be able to approach the back lawn from the museum’s galleries and experience the new installation during public hours, as weather permits.

“Dia has maintained a long and meaningful relationship with Lawrence Weiner and we are very proud to acquire another major, site-responsive work by him,” said Jessica Morgan, Director, Dia Art Foundation. “Weiner has always demonstrated a concern for how his work is encountered. This new work provides viewers with a prompt to consider the character of the materials listed and their meaning in relation to art, architecture, and the natural world—three key elements that intersect at Dia:Beacon.”

Weiner has said of his practice, “the subject of my art is art.” Each of his elliptical statements on long-term view at Dia:Beacon refer in various ways to the process of making. 5 Figures of Structure (1987), for example, describes the ways that three objects can formally relate to each other, and ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL (1968) describes the outcome of a material process, while Weiner’s Statement of Intent (1969) articulates the very conditions of art’s existence.

CADMIUM & MUD & TITANIUM & LEAD & FERROUS OXIDE & SO ON . . . was first displayed as part of Weiner’s solo exhibition, Displacement, at Dia Center for the Arts in New York City from April 1991 to April 1992. Continuing his exploration of artistic technique, the work lists a series of basic materials that have been central to aesthetic practice since the 1960s, including different kinds of metals (lead, titanium), pigments (cadmium, ferrous oxide), and even one of the materials of Land art (mud). Presented at Dia, this work will evoke the very substances enlisted by the Minimal, Postminimal, and Land artists represented in Dia’s collection. The acquisition of Weiner’s 1991 work strengthens the collection of historically important Conceptual art by providing greater context for the existing works at Dia:Beacon.

Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner was born in New York in 1942. He currently lives and works in New York and Amsterdam. Weiner’s site-specific interventions and his embrace of language as a sculptural medium played a fundamental role in the emergence of Postminimal and Conceptual strategies in the 1960s. In particular, Weiner’s Statement of Intent (1969) helped radically redefine the material status of the object. Like Sol LeWitt—another leading figure of Conceptual art in Dia’s collection—who argued that art could exist as a “concept” without physical form, Weiner posited that the idea for a sculpture or painting could be as powerful as the object itself. As he outlined in his Statement of Intent: “1. The artist may construct the work; 2. The work may be fabricated; 3. The work need not be built.” “Each of these situations,” he continued, “being equal and consistent with the artist’s intent.”

For more than forty years, Weiner has focused exclusively on producing aesthetic propositions. Based on empirical observation but always deliberately open-ended, his text installations invite viewers to participate in the imagining of the work’s final form. Weiner’s statements further engage viewers in dialogue through the often public conditions of their installation.

Dia Art Foundation

Founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is committed to initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving extraordinary art projects. Dia:Beacon opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York. Dia also maintains several long-term sites, including Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, which was inaugurated at Documenta 7 in 1982), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), all of which are located in New York City; the Dan Flavin Art Institute (established in 1983) in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) in western New Mexico; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in Great Salt Lake, Utah; and De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany.

Dia currently presents temporary exhibitions, performances, lectures, and readings on West 22nd Street in New York City.

* * * 

For additional information or materials contact:
Press Department, Dia Art Foundation, press@diaart.org, 212 293 5518