About
Any good work of art should have at least ten meanings.
—Walter De Maria
In his sculptures, land works, and installations, Walter De Maria (1935–2013) explored the relationship between the relative and the absolute, using basic geometric components to produce sublime repetitions. By arranging forms according to mathematical sequences, he worked at the intersections of Minimalism, conceptual art, and land art—drawing attention to the limits of gallery spaces, prioritizing bodily awareness, and locating the content of an artwork in the viewer.
In 1960, after completing his masters degree at University of California, Berkeley, De Maria moved to New York and began to show his work at a gallery he cofounded with Robert Whitman on Great Jones Street. Influenced by his peers, including Donald Judd and Fluxus member La Monte Young, he produced serialized and numbered sculptural sets of cast and polished steel.
De Maria’s precise polygonal structures impart a sense of the absolute. 14-Sided Open Polygon (1984), a stainless steel tetradecagon containing a steel ball, is emblematic of this distillation. The Pure Polygon Series (1975–76) is a suite of seven pencil drawings of basic geometric outlines in which a single side is added sequentially to change each shape, beginning with a triangle and ending with a heptagon. In 1977 The Lightning Field was installed in a remote area of the desert in western New Mexico. The work comprises four hundred polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid measuring one mile by one kilometer; the poles, meant to attract lightning, measure over twenty feet tall and have solid pointed tips that define a horizontal plane. The visitor both walks within the grid and views it from afar, observing it over an extended period of time and through space. Other major installations include The Broken Kilometer (1979), five hundred identical brass rods arranged in five rows, which, if placed end to end, would measure one kilometer; The New York Earth Room (1977), a white-walled SoHo loft filled with 280,000 pounds of soil; and The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), a one-kilometer-tall brass rod that stretches toward the sky from Friedrichsplatz Park in Kassel, Germany.
Truth / Beauty (1990–2016), a series of fourteen sculptures in seven pairs, was installed at Gagosian on Britannia Street in London in 2016, then at Gagosian in Le Bourget in 2016–17. At Le Bourget, the works were visible from the gallery’s mezzanine passerelle, recalling the 1981–82 installation of De Maria’s 360° I Ching / 64 Sculptures at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where the rods were arranged within a sunken area of the museum’s lobby floor.
In 2017 the Walter De Maria Estate and Gagosian collaborated to posthumously complete the artist’s final work, Truck Trilogy (2011–17), comprising three 1950s Chevrolet pickup trucks, each stripped of all extraneous elements and fitted with three vertical stainless steel rods in its bed: one circular in section, one square, and one triangular. Truck Trilogy was installed at Dia:Beacon in 2017 for two years.

Photo: bpk Bildagentur/Angelika Platen/Art Resource, New York
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Website
Exhibitions

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2021
The Spring 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Gerhard Richter’s Helen (1963) on its cover.

A Day in the Life of The Lightning Field
In the first of a two-part feature, John Elderfield recounts his experiences at The Lightning Field (1977), Walter De Maria’s legendary installation in New Mexico. Elderfield considers how this work requires our constantly finding and losing a sense of symmetry and order in shifting perceptions of space, scale, and distance, as the light changes throughout the day.

Frieze Sculpture New York: An Interview with Brett Littman
The inaugural presentation of Frieze Sculpture New York at Rockefeller Center opened on April 25, 2019. Before the opening, Brett Littman, the director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum and the curator of this exhibition, told Wyatt Allgeier about his vision for the project and detailed the artworks included.

Spotlight
Walter De Maria: Truck Trilogy
Lars Nittve investigates Truck Trilogy, Walter De Maria’s last work, conceived in 2011 and premiered at Dia:Beacon in 2017.

Walter De Maria: Meaningful Work
Artist Terry Winters, longtime friend of De Maria and member of the installation crew for The Lightning Field, recounts a trip to New Mexico and the surrounding area and attests to the power—the “rhythm and pulse of ancient mystery”—that continues to imbue De Maria’s artworks into the present day.
Fairs, Events & Announcements

Public Installation
Frieze Sculpture New York
April 25–June 28, 2019
Rockefeller Center, New York
www.frieze.com
Frieze, in partnership with Tishman Speyer, is launching Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center, New York, to be held annually in conjunction with Frieze New York. Brett Littman, director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York, is curating the immersive presentation, including works by Walter De Maria and Sarah Sze.
Three of the fourteen sculptures from De Maria’s Truth / Beauty series (1990–2016), which expands upon the artist’s use of permutations of rods, polygons, and numerical sequences, will be shown indoors.
Sze’s Split Stone (7:34) (2018), a natural granite boulder divided like a geode into two halves, in each of which the artist has embedded the image of a generic sunset, captured on her iPhone, will be outdoors.
Top: Walter De Maria, Truth / Beauty, 1990–2016 (detail) © Estate of Walter De Maria. Bottom: Sarah Sze, Split Stone (7:34), 2018 © Sarah Sze

In Conversation
Lucy Raven
Deantoni Parks
Tuesday, December 12, 2017, 6:30pm
Dia:Chelsea, New York
www.diaart.org
Artist Lucy Raven and musician Deantoni Parks will discuss the work of Walter De Maria. To attend this event, purchase tickets at www.diaart.org.
Walter De Maria, Truck Trilogy: Black Truck / Triangle, Circle, Square (2011–17) © 2017 Estate of Walter De Maria

Tour
Sculpture as Road
Saturday, October 14, 2017, 1pm
Dia:Beacon, New York
www.diaart.org
Through a series of embodied experiments in dialogue with works by Walter De Maria and John Chamberlain, this public tour led by Dia guide Jean-Marc Superville Sovak invites viewers to experience works in the collection through dialogue, observation, and physical discovery.
Walter De Maria, Truck Trilogy: Red Truck/Square, Triangle, Circle, 2011–17 © 2017 Estate of Walter De Maria
Museum Exhibitions

Closed
Walter De Maria in
By repetition, you start noticing details in the landscape
December 13, 2019–January 19, 2020
Le Commun–Bâtiment d’art contemporain, Geneva
mmmmm.ch
This exhibition, organized by MMMMM, explores the numerous interconnections between visual arts, minimalist composition, and 1960s experiments in the San Francisco Bay Area by looking at the intersections among nature, technology, and community. Work by Walter De Maria is included.
Walter De Maria, Instrument for La Monte Young, 1965–66 © Estate of Walter De Maria

Closed
Walter De Maria
Truck Trilogy
September 22, 2017–June 3, 2019
Dia:Beacon, New York
www.diaart.org
Following the completion of his Bel Air Trilogy (2000–11), Walter De Maria began his Truck Trilogy in 2011. The Truck Trilogy sculpture is composed of three 1950s Chevrolet pickup trucks. Each vehicle has been stripped of all extraneous elements, emphasizing aesthetic presence above practical function. Each flatbed has been fitted with three vertical, polished stainless steel, polygonal rods whose respective shapes are circular, square, and triangular. The sequence of rods is different in each truck. Truck Trilogy was completed posthumously in 2017 according to De Maria’s original plans.
Walter De Maria, Truck Trilogy: Red Truck/Square, Triangle, Circle, 2011–17 © 2017 Estate of Walter De Maria

Closed
Walter De Maria in
Minimalism: Space. Light. Object.
November 16, 2018–April 14, 2019
National Gallery Singapore
www.nationalgallery.sg
Minimalism: Space. Light. Object. examines the emergence, development, and legacies of Minimalism across Asia, the United States, and Europe. From the 1950s to the present day, ideas of presence and absence—often informed by Asian philosophies such as Zen Buddhism—are explored. Work by Walter De Maria is included.
Walter De Maria, 16-Sided Open Polygon, 1984 © 2019 Estate of Walter De Maria

Closed
Atlas
April 20–July 22, 2018
Fondazione Prada, Milan
www.fondazioneprada.org
The group of exhibited artworks, realized between 1960 and 2016, represents a possible mapping of the ideas and visions that have guided the creation of the collection and the collaborations with the artists that have contributed to the activities of the foundation throughout the years. Work by Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Damien Hirst, Carsten Höller, and Jeff Koons is included.
Carsten Höller, Upside-Down Mushroom Room, 2000 © Carsten Höller. Photo by Attilio Maranzano, courtesy Fondazione Prada