Michael Heizer

I like runic, Celtic, Druidic, cave painting, ancient, preliterate, from a time back when you were speaking to the lightning god, the ice god, and the cold-rainwater god.
—Michael Heizer

Gagosian is pleased to present new paintings and negative wall sculptures by Michael Heizer. Heizer made the paintings in New York and completed the sculptures in Nevada.

Heizer began his artistic career in New York in 1966 with a series of geometric canvases painted with PVA latex, applied with a roller. He worked between the city and eastern Nevada intermittently and reopened a painting studio in New York in 2015, continuing his production of hard-edge shaped canvases and developing a new series of “wet” paintings, utilizing poured and scraped mineral pigments. Each canvas combines drawing, painting, and printmaking with seamlessly integrated results.

The unique and arrestingly modern Wet Paintings (2015–) employ unanticipated forms for their overall structures. Heizer poured and squeegeed solvent and water-based metallic paints, imparting to each canvas a dimensional topography. The thickly pigmented, uneven geological surfaces of some of these paintings are reminiscent of the topographies found in his dirt and rock sculptures, such as Dragged Mass (1983). The Wet Painting surfaces also incorporate silkscreened lines, which have been radically enlarged from small notations. Delicate contrasting halos painted around the edges of some canvases further emphasize their distinctive shapes.