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 master’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley, De Maria moved to New York City; two years later, he showed his work at a gallery he cofounded with Robert Whitman at 9 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 Winter 2022
The Winter 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Anna Weyant’s Two Eileens (2022) on its cover.

Walter De Maria: The Object, the Action, the Aesthetic Feeling
The definitive monograph on the work of Walter De Maria was published earlier this fall. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Elizabeth Childress and Michael Childress of the Walter De Maria Archive talk to Gagosian senior director Kara Vander Weg about the origins of the publication and the revelations brought to light in its creation.

Light and Lightning: Wonder-Reactions at Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field
In this second installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield resumes his investigation of Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), focusing this time on how the hope to see lightning there has led to the work’s association with the Romantic conception of the sublime.

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.

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.

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

In Conversation
New Social Environment
“Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work” featuring Michelle White and Amanda Gluibizzi
Friday, February 24, 2023, 1pm EDT
As part of the Brooklyn Rail’s online series New Social Environment, Michelle White, senior curator at the Menil Collection, Houston, joins Amanda Gluibizzi, an art editor at the Rail, for a conversation about the Menil’s current exhibition Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work, on view through April 23, 2023. The talk will conclude with a poetry reading.
Installation view, Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work, Menil Collection, Houston, October 29, 2022–April 23, 2023. Artwork © The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Paul Hester

Lecture
Donna De Salvo on Walter De Maria
Thursday, February 2, 2023, 7–8pm
Menil Collection, Houston
menil.org
Donna De Salvo, curator of special projects at Dia Art Foundation, will discuss the work and career of Walter De Maria in conjunction with the Menil’s exhibition Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work, on view through April 23, 2023. Prior to the lecture, a reception will be held from 6 to 7pm in the Menil Bookstore, where copies of Gagosian’s recently published monograph Walter De Maria: The Object, the Action, the Aesthetic Feeling will be available for purchase. The event is free to attend.
Installation view, Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work, Menil Collection, Houston, October 29, 2022–April 23, 2023. Artwork © The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Paul Hester

Screening
Walter De Maria
HARD CORE
Monday, September 20, 2021, 6:45pm, and Saturday, September 25, 2021, 4:45pm
Anthology Film Archives, New York
anthologyfilmarchives.org
Walter De Maria’s film HARD CORE (1969) will be screened as part of Karl Precoda Selects, a program to celebrate the publication of Alan Licht’s book of interviews, Common Tones: Selected Interviews with Artists and Musicians 1995–2020. The selected films are directed by or feature artists highlighted in the book, or are discussed by Licht and his interlocutors in the interviews. Musician, filmmaker, and scholar Karl Precoda, one of the interviewees, has selected De Maria’s film, which was shot in the Black Rock desert of northwestern Nevada in the summer of 1969 and which features two pieces of music—Cricket Music (1964) and Ocean Music (1968)—composed, performed, and recorded by the artist. To attend the event, purchase tickets at ticketing.uswest.veezi.com.
Production still for Walter De Maria, HARD CORE, 1969 © 2021 Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Jim Farber
Museum Exhibitions

Closed
Walter De Maria in
Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past through the Present
March 8–May 14, 2023
Drawing Center, New York
drawingcenter.org
Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past through the Present explores the ways in which rituals, myths, traditions, ideologies, and beliefs can intersect across cultures, histories, and time periods. The exhibition brings together fifty-three works by more than thirty artists including Walter De Maria. Spanning a wide range of historical periods and cultural traditions, it highlights the esoteric and often elusive pursuit of understanding phenomena that sit outside our objective experience of the world.
Walter De Maria, Floating Mountain, c. 1961–64 © The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Rob McKeever

Closed
Walter De Maria
Boxes for Meaningless Work
October 29, 2022–April 23, 2023
Menil Collection, Houston
www.menil.org
Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work draws its title from the artist’s early interest in the concept of “meaningless work” and is the first museum exhibition to survey De Maria’s more than fifty-year-long career. Featuring works from the Menil Collection, the exhibition includes a large group of conceptual drawings and photography, sculpture related to the development of De Maria’s innovative Land art projects of the late 1960s and 1970s, examples of his sound and film work, and stainless-steel sculptures and monumental paintings from The Statement Series, made during the last decade of his life.
Installation view, Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work, Menil Collection, Houston, October 29, 2022–April 23, 2023. Artwork © The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Paul Hester

Closed
Monochrome Multitudes
September 22, 2022–January 8, 2023
Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
smartmuseum.uchicago.edu
Revisiting classic modernist ideas about flatness, idealized form, and colors, this exhibition opens up the seemingly reductive format of the monochrome to reveal its global resonance and creative possibilities while working toward a more expansive narrative of twentieth and twenty-first century art. Work by Alexander Calder, Walter De Maria, Helen Frankenthaler, Theaster Gates, Frank Gehry, Sally Mann, and Richard Serra is included.
Sally Mann, The Bath, 1989 © Sally Mann

Closed
Walter De Maria
The 2000 Sculpture
August 27, 2021–February 20, 2022
Kunsthaus Zürich
www.kunsthaus.ch
Walter De Maria’s The 2000 Sculpture (1992) comprises a total of two thousand white plaster rods each 50 centimeters long and varying between 11.8 and 12 centimeters tall. The individual elements have five, seven, or nine sides. Following a specific rhythm, they are arranged on a surface covering 500 square meters, in a total of twenty rows each with one hundred rods. The result is a kind of herringbone pattern, with the rods seeming to move toward or away from the viewer, depending on where he or she stands. This creates a tension between predictable regularity and individual perception that is underscored by the light and space surrounding the arrangement.
Walter De Maria, The 2000 Sculpture, 1992 © Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich