Michael Heizer
1944–
Since the late 1960s, sculptor and Land art pioneer Michael Heizer has produced large-scale works that engage with the natural environment, either in sculptural form or through acts of carving and displacing earth. For his first prominent earthwork, Double Negative (1969), he gouged deep trenches into Mormon Mesa, near Overton, Nevada, displacing more than 240,000 tons of rock into a gap at the mesa’s edge. The work consists of these negative spaces, both natural and man-made.
Heizer’s Actual Size: Munich Rotary is a mediated, “screened” version of another of his 1969 earthworks, Munich Depression, in which he removed 1,000 tons of earth in a massive conical shape near Munich, Germany. Using six custom- made steel projectors, each holding a black-and-white photographic positive on a glass plate, Heizer projects documented imagery of the Munich excavation as a continuous, panoramic landscape at a 1:1 scale, displacing the original earthwork into the gallery space and placing the viewer inside the depression, where every detail appears life-sized. The materiality of the installation’s heavy steel projection equipment references construction machinery and the act of excavating the original site. Yet Actual Size: Munich Rotary consists of what is not physically there— what has been displaced. The visual experience of the installation amplifies this displacement, since the imagery becomes increasingly blurry as the viewer approaches it. Heizer’s work has consistently reflected on the relationships between the natural and technological and their transformations and displacements. As the artist has put it: “We live in a world that’s technological and primordial simultaneously. I guess the idea is to make art that reflects this premise.”
Introduction
Michael Heizer (born 1944) is an American land artist specializing in large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Working largely outside the confines of the traditional art spaces of galleries and museums, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. A pioneer of 20th-century land art or Earthworks movement, he is widely recognized for sculptures and environmental structures made with earth-moving equipment, which he began creating in the American West in 1967. He currently lives and works in Hiko, Nevada, and New York City.
Wikidata identifier
Q558432
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 1, 2025.
Introduction
American artist.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, painter, sculptor
ULAN identifier
500023902
Names
Michael Heizer
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 1, 2025.
