B. 1944, BERKELEY, CA
Micheal Heizer is one of the original and most prominent figures of land art and has since the late 1960s produced site-specific works and geometric abstractions, often on monumental scales, that reflect on humanity and nature, history and oblivion, positive and negative space. Much of his practice involves tremendous amounts of displacement, construction, or both. With his seminal Double Negative (1969), Heizer created a pair of aligned trenches across from one another in a natural canyon in Nevada. Soon after, in 1970, he began work on City, an ongoing project inspired by ancient, pre-Columbian architectural forms found in North and South American landscapes. In 2015 City and the surrounding area of the Nevada desert were designated as national monuments.
In parallel to these land-art projects, Heizer has also produced work that brings aspects of this practice to museum and gallery spaces. Some of these involve literally transporting massive boulders, as with as seen in the permanent installation Levitated Mass (2012) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Other works evoke similar imagery through representational and abstract means, icluding both the prints and the shaped paintings.
Michael Heizer has been collaborating with Jean-Paul Russell and Durham Press since its start in 1988. Together they have experimented and collaborated on multiple editions and monoprints. The ambitious and unusual prints evoke ancient rocks and enigmatic, primeval forms; they also document the visual language of a profound sculptor.
Heizer is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York. In addition to numerous solo shows at galleries across the world, he has been the focus of individual presentations at prominent institutions such as the Detroit Institute of Arts (1971); Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands (1979); St. Louis Art Museum (1980); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1984); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1985 and 2016); Fondazione Prada, Milan (1996), and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012).
His work is represented in the holdings of
Dia Beacon, New York; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Menil Collection, Houston; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many other public and private collections.
