When I made the negative sculptures I realized the possibility of an entire vocabulary, making sculptures with basic materials such as earth. I felt that the areas of drawing and painting should also be enveloped so as to expose the whole vocabulary.
—Michael Heizer
Gagosian is pleased to present works by Michael Heizer, dating from 1968 to the present.
Over fifty years, Heizer has redefined the very idea of sculpture in his explorations of size, mass, and process. His earth-moving constructions, paintings, and drawings explore the dynamics of positive and negative space.
As a young artist in New York in the 1960s, Heizer began making “displacement paintings,” geometric canvases in light and dark tones. In the winter of 1967, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, he excavated several chasms in the earth, adapting the New York paintings to three dimensions. These “un-sculptures,” or “sculptures in reverse,” became the basis of a new sculptural vocabulary, as Heizer began using the land, and its removal, as his media.
In the summer of 1968, Heizer installed Ciliata and Slot Mass on the California-Nevada border. Ciliata, a rectangular volume of hollowed-out earth, contained jutting wooden protuberances like the cilia of a cell. The adjacent Slot Mass comprised parallel descending tracks cut into the ground. The negative forms undergirded a rock that rested on their deepest end. Slot Mass was the precursor of Levitated Mass, a sculpture Heizer originally attempted to make in 1969; a larger version of Levitated Mass was permanently installed in 2012 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Both Ciliata and Slot Mass were built with wood and earth, and intended to degrade. Permanent steel versions of both, titled Cilia (1968–90) and Slot Mass (1968–2017), are on public view for the first time at Gagosian Paris, in the identical configuration to 1968.
