Michael Heizer

Gagosian is pleased to present two new negative sculptures by Michael Heizer, Convoluted Line A and Convoluted Line B (both 2024), at the gallery at 522 West 21st Street, New York. A small selection of related early drawings will also be on view. The sculptures represent the pinnacle of an artistic lineage that reaches back to Heizer’s earliest outdoor sculptures made in the 1960s in the Nevada and California deserts.

Among the artist’s most complex negative line sculptures, Convoluted Line A and Convoluted Line B are winding steel earth liners inserted into a raised concrete floor. Curved with the delicacy of a drawn line, they reflect the artist’s interest in precise mark making at monumental scale and the possibilities of line as sculptural form. Conceived with the gallery’s spacious interior in mind and placed in relation to one another, they span 87 1/2 feet in length and form a unified environment that encourages experiential viewing.

Heizer’s ongoing inquiry into the formal possibilities of line, size, and negative space began in the 1960s with shaped canvases composed with lighter and darker geometric passages to suggest the absence and presence of form. In 1967, he began employing these concepts in three-dimensional sculptures, cutting into the earth. Early negative line sculptures include the Nine Nevada Depressions (1968, no longer extant), multiple excavations in the form of loops, intersections, zigzags, and broken lines across 520 miles of terrain, escalating in Double Negative (1969), two 50-foot-deep cuts into two opposing mesa walls near the Virgin River in Nevada.