Michael Heizer

Michael Heizer – The person as artist in dialogue with the land

Michael Heizer was born on 4 November 1944 in Berkeley, California. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1963 to 1964, with his early artistic interest based in painting. At the start of his career, he painted first and foremost in the Abstract Expressionist style but felt increasingly drawn to Minimal Art, developing an increasingly strict formal language on this basis. In 1966, he moved to New York, and in the winter of the following year he was able to realise his first Land Art projects. He literally went into the desert for his art: in Arizona, California and Nevada he began what he calls a dialogue with the land – large sculptures formed by the conscious and planned intervention in the natural formations of the landscape. The artist rejects the traditional perception of sculpture; he is not interested in manipulating a particular material mass in order to create the desired shape, but rather he wishes to incorporate the natural spaces and voids in his work.

Manipulated nature as large-scale artwork

Michael Heizer approaches his often monumentally proportioned projects with great ambition and ambition. For his highly acclaimed work Double Negative in 1969, he arranged for 240,000 tons of rock to be spectacularly moved with bulldozers and dynamite to create a precisely calculated artificial gorge, an artwork that could be walked through. In this, the artist’s thoughts are certainly of a subtle and poetic nature: Michael Heizer does not wish to offer sensation and spectacle, but rather to awaken a new awareness for the grandeur of nature, entirely in the sense of the Romantic art of the 19th century. The geometric forms which Heizer realises in his vast Land Art projects are not new in art, but quite the opposite, thousands of years old – but never before have they been transferred onto the organic landscape in such dimensions. Despite this pronounced sensitivity for nature, Michael Heizer consciously distances himself from the goals of the ecological movement: He is exclusively concerned with art, not with landscapes. 

Art is created out of nature and returns back to it

Michael Heizer accepts the transience of his Land Art and consciously waives measures of conservation. The idea of instability is a part of his understanding of art; the elements themselves take over the man-made artwork, transpose it into the natural cycle, process it, sand it, and make it resemble the landscape. In the 1970s, Michael Heizer turned increasingly back to the classical genres, created small sculptures out of wood, drawings on zinc sheets, and paintings in grey tones. He remains true to Land Art however: In his City project, which spanned four decades, he made reference to the traditions of Indian mound buildings. He took part in documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale and has presented works in the great museums of the world. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2009.

Michael Heizer lives and works today in New York.