The Gagosian Gallery is pleased to participate in FOG Design+Art 2020 with a presentation of works by Michael Heizer and Mary Weatherford.
Over the past fifty years, Land art pioneer Heizer has produced a strikingly original body of sculptures—alongside numerous paintings and drawings—in which extremes of scale and mass prompt a continual reexamination of process and site. Often combining natural and artificial forms and materials, and characteristically blurring the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, Heizer works both within and far beyond the context of conventional museum and gallery exhibitions.
Well known for her large abstract paintings inspired in part by the Californian landscape, Weatherford also makes works on paper that alternate between areas of dense and sparse coloration to evoke a broad spectrum of metaphysical states and conditions. Further, she applies collage and assemblage techniques across a range of mediums and scales, bringing physical components of the natural world such as seashells and starfish directly into her works on paper just as she incorporates neon tubes into her paintings on canvas.
Gagosian’s booth at FOG Design+Art features a pair of works from Heizer’s ongoing Negative Wall Sculptures, in which large rocks occupy steel-lined alcoves set into the walls of the booth. These distinctive works relate to his early sculpture Displaced/Replaced Mass (1969), in which three granite masses were sunk into concrete-walled holes dug into the Nevada desert floor, and Levitated Mass (2012), in which a 340-ton rock balances atop a concrete channel at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Such projects explore the visceral and perceptual resonances of positive and negative space and evoke the sublime power of nature.
Weatherford’s highly atmospheric works on paper—some of the largest she has made to date—reveal her to be both a brilliant colorist and a passionate student of American painting’s diverse history, in particular, its often-overlooked nineteenth-century Symbolist movement. In recent gestural works on Japanese Gampi tissue that evoke the arid terrain of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, as well as in the earlier Sand Dollar series, she demonstrates her ability to crystallize visual and emotional experience. A survey exhibition of her work scheduled to open in February at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, will underscore this consistent vision.
Together, Heizer and Weatherford conjure a dialogue about our complex interaction with the environment at large. Heizer’s unrefined rocks are contained by a smooth manmade alloy, yet they remain imposing—even seemingly impossible—in the apparent negation of their enormous weight. Weatherford’s abstracted landscapes do not set urban and rural environments against one another, but immerse us instead in the artist’s impressions of a world outside of time. A PDF with detailed information on the works is available from the gallery at inquire@gagosian.com.To attend the fair, purchase tickets at fogfair.com.
Featured image: Michael Heizer, Scoria Negative Wall Sculpture, 2007 © Michael Heizer
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