Michael Heizer (1944)

Professions: Sculptor; Painter

• 

  

  MICHAEL HEIZER

• 

  

  Michael Heizer , b.1944 Untitled No. 8 polyvinal and latex on canvas

• 

  

  MICHAEL HEIZER

• 

  

  Michael Heizer b. 1944

• Michael Heizer Related Content
• Michael Heizer Sold at Auction

Michael Heizer Biography

(b Berkeley, CA, 4 Nov 1944). American sculptor, painter and printmaker. He studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1963 to 1964 and moved to New York in 1966. His early imagery showed an awareness of Minimalist ideals. In 1967, however, he temporarily renounced painting and pursued what became a lasting interest in LAND ART. His ‘excavations’ in the desert of the American Southwest were prefigured by childhood travels to Pre-Columbian and Egyptian archaeological sites with his father, anthropologist Robert Heizer. The earthworks of the late 1960s and early 1970s consisted of moving vast, yet precise quantities of soil in regions of virtual inaccessibility, a strategy he shared with other artists such as Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson and James Turrell. Double Negative (1969–70; Los Angeles, CA, Mus. Contemp. A.) exemplifies his concern for juxtaposing the monumental with the ephemeral. The work displaced c . 250,000 tonnes of desert rock, while cutting a horizontal shaft across the lip of an eroding precipice, thus poising the artist’s heroic gesture against the imminent forces of nature. Works produced for museum and gallery exhibitions, for example Windows/Matchdrop (1969; Düsseldorf, Städt. Ksthalle), where a sidewalk is incised according to the dictate of several fallen matchsticks, demonstrate also his debt to earlier modernist questionings of the creative context and authority of the artist. Heizer incorporated the role of chance in his work’s design.

Back to the Top

Michael Heizer Related Content

• Auction Houses

  Genres/Artists

• Featured Houses (8)

  • Bonhams
  • DuMouchelles
  • Freeman's
  • Heritage Auctions
  • Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)
  • Phillips de Pury & Company
  • Stair Galleries
  • Wright
  • Other Houses (5)
  • Christie's
  • Christies East
  • Sotheby's
  • Sothebys Arcade
  • Venator & Hanstein

• Environmental Art (8)

  • Arman
  • Christo
  • Walter DeMaria
  • Richard Long
  • Robert Clarke Morris
  • Dennis A Oppenheim
  • Robert Smithson
  • Alan Sonfist

• Land art (4)

  • Walter De Maria
  • Richard Long
  • Dennis A Oppenheim
  • Robert Smithson

Back to the Top