Louwrien Wijers

The work of Louwrien Wijers spans through many decades and many geographies. In the early 1960s, she worked as a writer and journalist in Amsterdam, before becoming involved with the Fluxus movement towards the end of the decade. In those years she became an artist and expanded her writing to the conceptual and visual field. She developed a practice that she called “writing as sculpture,” comprising transcriptions of talks with artists, thinkers and spiritual leaders. Writing here is to be understood both as a vessel of content and as an aesthetic visual presence. In the 1970s Louwrien traveled to New York and spent considerable time at the Chelsea Hotel where she had chats with artists and wrote down detailed descriptions of performances she witnessed. Often hand-written and sometimes presented in the black ink of the type-writer, these works question the boundaries of individual and collective works.
In a similar manner her house on the Herengracht in Amsterdam became a place for local and international artists to meet. For more than a decade Louwrien has been residing in Friesland, in the village of Ferwerd, in a house gifted to her by the performance artist Ben D’Armagnac (1940-1978). She continues to be a source of inspiration for many artists of younger generation.