Works Exhibited
About
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.
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Behind the Art
Michael Heizer: New Paintings and Sculpture
Michael Heizer’s impressive installation at Gagosian Beverly Hills features new paintings that deny the conventional rectangular or square confines of the canvas, alongside negative wall sculptures, known for their size, raw materials, and ability to awe viewers.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2022
The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.
A City in the Ocean of Time
Michael Heizer’s City, an artwork over fifty years in the making, opened to the public this fall. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we are honored to publish the late Dave Hickey’s report on his visit to the City.
Artists’ Magazines
Gwen Allen recounts her discovery of cutting-edge artists’ magazines from the 1960s and 1970s and explores the roots and implications of these singular publications.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2019
The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.
Intimate Grandeur: Glenstone Museum
Paul Goldberger tracks the evolution of Mitchell and Emily Rales’s Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. Set amid 230 acres of pristine landscape and housing a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art, this graceful complex of pavilions, designed by architects Thomas Phifer and Partners, opened to the public in the fall of 2018.
