Michael Heizer "Works from the 1960s and 70s"
David Zwirner 19th Street
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David Zwirner presents a selection of works from the 1960s and 70s by American artist Michael Heizer (b. 1944) at the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street space.
As a pioneer of the 1960s Land Art movement, Heizer has created a prolific and ambitious practice encompassing painting, sculpture, and large-scale earthworks. His paintings and sculptures, which he has produced intermittently throughout his career—manifest many of the ideas explored in his monumental works—which use land as a material form. Bringing together rarely seen paintings and sculptures from the 1960s and 70s, this exhibition reveals Heizer’s early engagement with the contrasting qualities of negative and positive forms.
Heizer moved from California to New York City in 1966, where he began his career as a painter. He was attracted to the concepts and aesthetics of what is now referred to as Minimalism, and his practice
during this period was in close dialogue with that of the artists he befriended, such as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, Walter de Maria, and Tony Smith. By the late 1960s, Heizer had left the constraints of New York City for the deserts of California and Nevada, where he could create large-scale works that did not conform to the institutional and commercial boundaries of museums and galleries. It is in these empty deserts that he created some of his most impressive and laborious earthworks, among them Double Negative (1969-70). Inspired by Egyptian, Incan, and Mayan architectural ruins—which his father, an archeologist, exposed him to at a young age—Heizer’s earthworks often employ depressions and trenches in the ground as a means of addressing displacement and space. A prominent feature in the artist’s oeuvre has been his preoccupation with the opposing relationship between presence and absence (or form and void), an idea that originated with Heizer’s earliest paintings, and which is clearly pronounced in many of his renowned earthworks.
Media
Schedule
from October 30, 2010 to December 21, 2010