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Walter De Maria, Large Red Sphere, 2002 © Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Haydar Koyupinar

Installation

Walter De Maria
Ocean Music

July 25–30, 2023, 12–6pm
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
www.pinakothek.de

To mark the tenth anniversary of Walter De Maria’s death, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich will play Ocean Music (1968), a sound piece in which the artist combined his own recordings of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with his drum improvisation. The recording will play in the historic Türkentor (Turkish Gate) building, which houses De Maria’s sculpture Large Red Sphere (2002). On Thursday, July 27, the musical presentation will continue until 8pm. The event is free to attend.

Walter De Maria, Large Red Sphere, 2002 © Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Haydar Koyupinar

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

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.

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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

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

Production still for Walter De Maria, HARD CORE, 1969 © 2021 Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Jim Farber

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

Top: Walter De Maria, Truth / Beauty, 1990–2016 (detail) © Estate of Walter De Maria. Bottom: Sarah Sze, Split Stone (7:34), 2018 © Sarah Sze

Public Installation

Frieze Sculpture New York

April 25–June 28, 2019
Rockefeller Center, New York
www.frieze.com

Frieze, in partnership with Tishman Speyer, is launching Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center, New York, to be held annually in conjunction with Frieze New York. Brett Littman, director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York, is curating the immersive presentation, including works by Walter De Maria and Sarah Sze.

Three of the fourteen sculptures from De Maria’s Truth / Beauty series (1990–2016), which expands upon the artist’s use of permutations of rods, polygons, and numerical sequences, will be shown indoors.

Sze’s Split Stone (7:34) (2018), a natural granite boulder divided like a geode into two halves, in each of which the artist has embedded the image of a generic sunset, captured on her iPhone, will be outdoors.

Top: Walter De Maria, Truth / Beauty, 1990–2016 (detail) © Estate of Walter De Maria. Bottom: Sarah Sze, Split Stone (7:34), 2018 © Sarah Sze

Walter De Maria, Truck Trilogy: Black Truck / Triangle, Circle, Square (2011–17) © 2017 Estate of Walter De Maria

In Conversation

Lucy Raven
Deantoni Parks

Tuesday, December 12, 2017, 6:30pm
Dia:Chelsea, New York
www.diaart.org

Artist Lucy Raven and musician Deantoni Parks will discuss the work of Walter De Maria. To attend this event, purchase tickets at www.diaart.org.

Walter De Maria, Truck Trilogy: Black Truck / Triangle, Circle, Square (2011–17) © 2017 Estate of Walter De Maria

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Museum Exhibitions

Walter De Maria, Floating Mountain, c. 1961–64 © The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Rob McKeever

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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

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

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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

Sally Mann, The Bath, 1989 © Sally Mann

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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

Walter De Maria, The 2000 Sculpture, 1992 © Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich

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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

Walter De Maria, Untitled [Desert Walk], c. 1961, Menil Collection, Houston © Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Paul Hester

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Dream Monuments
Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s

May 21–September 19, 2021
Menil Collection, Houston
www.menil.org

This exhibition presents drawings that challenge the conventional idea of the monument as a permanent, grand, or commemorative form. The provisional character of drawing helped artists envision forms in improbable scales and for impossible conditions, radically transforming the monument to reflect a new set of sensibilities. Scaled to the size of the page but enormous in ambition, these works rethink history while rendering environments as at turns absurd, surreal, or subjective. Work by Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer is included.

Walter De Maria, Untitled [Desert Walk], c. 1961, Menil Collection, Houston © Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Paul Hester

Walter De Maria, Instrument for La Monte Young, 1965–66 © Estate of Walter De Maria

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Walter De Maria in
By repetition, you start noticing details in the landscape

December 13, 2019–January 19, 2020
Le Commun–Bâtiment d’art contemporain, Geneva
mmmmm.ch

This exhibition, organized by MMMMM, explores the numerous interconnections between visual arts, minimalist composition, and 1960s experiments in the San Francisco Bay Area by looking at the intersections among nature, technology, and community. Work by Walter De Maria is included.

Walter De Maria, Instrument for La Monte Young, 1965–66 © Estate of Walter De Maria

Walter De Maria, Truck Trilogy: Red Truck/Square, Triangle, Circle, 2011–17 © 2017 Estate of Walter De Maria

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Walter De Maria
Truck Trilogy

September 22, 2017–June 3, 2019
Dia:Beacon, New York
www.diaart.org

Following the completion of his Bel Air Trilogy (2000–11), Walter De Maria began his Truck Trilogy in 2011. The Truck Trilogy sculpture is composed of three 1950s Chevrolet pickup trucks. Each vehicle has been stripped of all extraneous elements, emphasizing aesthetic presence above practical function. Each flatbed has been fitted with three vertical, polished stainless steel, polygonal rods whose respective shapes are circular, square, and triangular. The sequence of rods is different in each truck. Truck Trilogy was completed posthumously in 2017 according to De Maria’s original plans.

Walter De Maria, Truck Trilogy: Red Truck/Square, Triangle, Circle, 2011–17 © 2017 Estate of Walter De Maria

Walter De Maria, 16-Sided Open Polygon, 1984 © 2019 Estate of Walter De Maria

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Walter De Maria in
Minimalism: Space. Light. Object.

November 16, 2018–April 14, 2019
National Gallery Singapore
www.nationalgallery.sg

Minimalism: Space. Light. Object. examines the emergence, development, and legacies of Minimalism across Asia, the United States, and Europe. From the 1950s to the present day, ideas of presence and absence—often informed by Asian philosophies such as Zen Buddhism—are explored. Work by Walter De Maria is included.

Walter De Maria, 16-Sided Open Polygon, 1984 © 2019 Estate of Walter De Maria

Carsten Höller, Upside-Down Mushroom Room, 2000 © Carsten Höller. Photo by Attilio Maranzano, courtesy Fondazione Prada

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Atlas

April 20–July 22, 2018
Fondazione Prada, Milan
www.fondazioneprada.org

The group of exhibited artworks, realized between 1960 and 2016, represents a possible mapping of the ideas and visions that have guided the creation of the collection and the collaborations with the artists  that have contributed to the activities of the foundation throughout the years. Work by Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Damien Hirst, Carsten Höller, and Jeff Koons is included.

Carsten Höller, Upside-Down Mushroom Room, 2000 © Carsten Höller. Photo by Attilio Maranzano, courtesy Fondazione Prada

Walter De Maria, Large Rod Series: Circle/Rectangle 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 1986, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major Accessions) and the Dallas Museum of Art TWO × TWO for AIDS and Art Fund © Estate of Walter De Maria

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Walter De Maria
Surface Waves

May 27, 2017–February 4, 2018
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
www.sfmoma.org

This marks the debut of the artist’s first sculpture to enter the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s collection: an arresting floor piece known as Large Rod Series: Circle/Rectangle, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 (1986). Consisting of massive, precisely honed polygonal rods polished to a shine so lustrous as to appear liquid, the work can be shown in three distinct formal configurations, each of which have been presented during the course of the exhibition. Recordings of De Maria’s Ocean Music (1968) and Cricket Music (1964) play in the galleries daily, offering an immersive sensory experience of rhythm in sculpture and in sound.

Walter De Maria, Large Rod Series: Circle/Rectangle 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 1986, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major Accessions) and the Dallas Museum of Art TWO × TWO for AIDS and Art Fund © Estate of Walter De Maria

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2015. Photo by Mats Nordman

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The Transported Man

April 29–October 22, 2017
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing
broadmuseum.msu.edu

The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University is pleased to announce its debut exhibition curated by director Marc-Olivier Wahler. The Transported Man spans the entire museum and features more than fifty renowned and emerging artists whose work relies on the notion of belief. Work by Walter De Maria, Urs Fischer, and Adam McEwen is included.

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2015. Photo by Mats Nordman

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969

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Los Angeles to New York
Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971

March 19–September 10, 2017
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
www.lacma.org

This exhibition features modern and contemporary works from the personal collection of gallerist Virginia Dwan. The selection has been culled from Dwan’s promised gift to Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art, which includes major works by American artists based on the East and West Coasts. The exhibition aims to illustrate Dwan’s creative spirit and her close association with Minimalism, conceptual art, and large-scale Earthworks. Included are artists Arakawa, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, and Yves Klein.

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969

See all Museum Exhibitions for Walter De Maria