His Magna Charta was a handout for contemporary art, proclaimed in 1968 in three paragraphs.

The artist can produce the work, also have it produced, but it does not necessarily have to be produced.

Each of these options is equivalent, "the recipient" can decide if necessary.

Whatever a work of art may appear mentally or physically, worrying about it is itself art.

This was the message of Lawrence Weiner's “Declaration of Intent”, the undisputed main work of the son of a confectionery dealer, born in New York in 1942, who had shaped art as an autodidact since the 1960s and took part in the Documenta four times.

The name Lawrence Weiner and the immensely influential Conceptual Art appear as synonyms to this day, even if the associated thoughts and the term were brought into play by Henry Flynt as early as 1962.

Always fresh and youthful

Weiner's preferred form of expression was text, font and typography in capital letters, often underlined or curled up with colored lines, always fresh and youthful, anything but senseless on the wall - horizontally, vertically, swirled in pirouettes, whether in a museum or in public space. Numerous such text works, which Weiner understood idiosyncratically as sculptures, deal with weight, measure and relation; others allude to the relationship between nature, culture and civilization; some things just stay cryptic. Many wall works actually appear as abstract as non-representational sculptures and as extensive as the Land Art environments.

The dry, all-black lettering in the Kölnischer Kunstverein will not be forgotten, in 2000 in a double exhibition with the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles: "As far as the eye can see", as far as the eye can see - imagination sparked by poetry and prose at the same time. At the very beginning and as the starting point of this slender oeuvre from around 1962 there was a chunky, hewn stone that Weiner had pedestalized on a rustic wooden table - from here the material work was to dissolve purposefully, a completely unexpected work, to be seen in 2008 colorful retrospective in the K21 of the Düsseldorf art collection.

We met the artist there, he casually complained of knee pain.

Hopefully nothing bad?

Not really, says Weiner, because he was shot once as a teenager in the Bronx, where he grew up.

He told it laconically, as if he had missed a bus.

Lawrence Weiner died last Thursday in New York at the age of seventy-nine after a long and serious illness.