Michael Heizer

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.

In the late 1960s, Heizer left New York City for the deserts of California and Nevada, where he began making his first "negative" sculptures.

These works were created by removing earth to shape subterranean negative forms directly into desert floor.

Heizer began his artistic career in New York in 1966 with a series of geometric canvases painted with PVA latex.

The paintings that would follow, characterized by non-traditionally shaped canvases, 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 (1966) and Track Painting (1967), he emphasizes the perimeters of raw canvases by painting them black, while the white interiors are perceived as negative spaces.

These hard-edged "displacement paintings" parallel the immense geometries he achieves when moving earth.

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.

Completed in 1967, North, East, South, West, consisted of several geometrically shaped holes dug in the Sierra Nevada.

The following year Heizer completed Nine Nevada Depressions, a series of large negative sculptures located primarily on dry lakes throughout the state, Jean Dry Lake, Black Rock Desert and Massacre Dry Lake, near Vya, Nevada among them.

Other recent public artworks by Michael Heizer include Tangential Circular Negative Line in Mauvoisin, Switzerland, commissioned by Fondation Air&Art directed by Jean Maurice Varone, as well as Collapse (1967/2016) and Compression Line (1968/2016) at Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland.

In 1968, Heizer was included in Earth Works, the influential group show at Virginia Dwan's gallery, and then in the Whitney Museum painting annual in 1969, where his contribution was a huge photograph of a dye painting in the desert.

In 1969, Heizer made the series Primitive Dye Paintings, in which white lime powder and concentrated aniline dyes were spread over the dry desert landscape, covering large areas that, when viewed from the air, formed amorphous, organic shapes.

The culmination of this critical early period was the creation of Double Negative in 1969, a project for which he displaced 240,000 tons of rock in the Nevada desert, cutting two enormous trenches—each one 50-feet-deep and 30-feet-wide and together spanning 1,500 feet—at the eastern edge of Mormon Mesa near Overton, Nevada.

Heizer has since continued his exploration of the dynamics between positive forms and negative space.

For Displaced/Replaced Mass (1969/1977), later installed outside the Marina del Rey, California, home of Roy and Carol Doumani, he planted four granite boulders of different sizes from the High Sierra into lid-less concrete boxes in the earth so that the tops of the rocks are roughly level with the ground.

For his first one-person show, at the Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich in 1969, he removed 1,000 tons of earth in a conical shape to create Munich Depression.

In the early 1970s, Heizer began work on City, an enormous complex in the rural desert of Lincoln County, Nevada.

His work on the project continues to this day, supported by the Dia Art Foundation through a grant from the Lannan Foundation.

Limited public access to City began in 2022.

A campaign to have the Basin and Range area around City designated as a national monument to protect it from development took place, and a group of American museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Walker Art Center, have joined to draw public attention to a petition urging preservation of the area.

The slate grey contours of U Painting (1975), for example, anticipate the shapes of the depressions and angular mounds that appear in one of his latest projects City.

His Adjacent, Against, Upon (1976) juxtaposes three large granite slabs in different relationships to cast concrete forms; the 30-50 ton granite slabs were quarried in the Cascade Mountain Range and transported by barge and train to Myrtle Edwards Park.

In 1977, he was included in documenta 6, Kassel.

Major exhibitions of his work have been staged at institutions such as the Museum Folkwang, Essen (1979), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1984), and Fondazione Prada, Milan (1996).

For a 1982 work at the former IBM Building in New York, Heizer sheared off the top of a large rock and cut grooves into the surface before setting it on supports hidden within a stainless steel structure.

Designed as a fountain, the boulder appears to float over running water.

He called it Levitated Mass, a title he would use again in future.

Commissioned by the president of the Ottawa Silica Company, the Effigy Tumuli earthwork in Illinois is composed of five abstract animal earthworks reclaiming the site of an abandoned surface coal mine along the Illinois River; the shapes (1983–85)—a frog, a water strider, a catfish, a turtle, and a snake—reflect the environment of the site, which overlooks the river.

In 2012, Heizer completed Levitated Mass (2012).

On permanent installation at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Levitated Mass is a massive white, diorite boulder (21.5 feet wide and 21.5 feet high) that sits atop a 456-foot-long sloped walkway, allowing viewers to experience the weight of the rock as they walk through the empty space below.

It took eleven nights, from February 28 to March 10, 2012, to move the 340-ton rock from Jurupa Valley to the museum.

The installation is situated in a field of polished concrete slices, set at a slight angle between the Resnick Pavilion and Sixth Street.

Heizer opened the exhibit on June 24, 2012.

A feature documentary, also named Levitated Mass, was directed and edited by the filmmaker Doug Pray.

It details the making of the sculpture as it relates to Heizer's career while portraying the boulder's 105-mile journey through Los Angeles and the public's reaction to its installation.

In July 2015, President Barack Obama signed a proclamation (using his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906) creating the Basin and Range National Monument on 704,000 acres in Lincoln and Nye counties, an area including Heizer's City.

Heizer's artworks are represented in museum collections and public spaces worldwide.