ART CITIES:N.York-Michael Heizer
Starting in the 1960s, as a pioneer of Land Art, Michael Heizer constructed a series of enormous works across the American West, from his first artwork “Double Negative”, the mall-sized earth sculpture, called “City”, in the Nevada desert, to ‘’Levitated Mass’’, a precariously balance of a 340-ton granite boulder over a concrete trench at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive
In his new exhibition comprises rarely or never-before-seen early paintings, the “Altar” series of new monumental steel sculptures, and negative wall sculptures featuring metamorphic and igneous rocks. Working largely outside the confines of gallery and museum, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. In the late 1960s, he relocated to New York, while continuing to travel and live in the open terrain of the American West, where he has since created awe-inspiring land artworks. Heizer draws on both ancient and contemporary architecture and art, cultivating tons of materials, including dirt, rock, and steel, in his quest to create a “Permanent American art”. These influences are present in “City”, the vast land sculpture in Nevada that he has been building continuously since 1972. The shaped canvases from the 1960s and 1970s demonstrate Heizer’s early exploration of positive and negative forms, such harmonies of presence and absence, matter and space, are essential to his art. In “Trapezoid Painting” and “Track Painting”, he emphasizes the perimeters of raw canvases by painting them black, while the white interiors are perceived as negative spaces. In works that he describes as “Negative wall sculptures”, Heizer harnesses the beauty and bulk of rock and mineral specimens. Here, the rocks are edged into rectangular cavities cut into the gallery walls, creating a tension between viewer, nature, and architecture. “Altar 1”, “Altar 2”, and “Altar 3” are tiered steel platforms measuring up to 40 feet by 40 feet, each of which presents curvilinear coated steel elements that lean dynamically and at contrasting angles. Echoing the “Chaotic Geometric Sculptures” of the late 1980s, many of Heizer’s latest sculptures are delineated by taped and stenciled lines around their perimeters; the surfaces are grounds for silkscreened, fragmented black and white images derived from the artist’s photographs and drawings. The massive forms are inspired by a range of pictographic influences, from ancient rock carvings to the cryptic icons of cattle-branding. By unifying the images and architecture of different cultures and eras, Heizer strives to create a resonant art for a pluralistic world.
Info: “Altars”, Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Str., New York, Duration: 9/5-2/7/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
