Biography of Michael Heizer
Land art pioneer, Michael Heizer has been wowing audiences with his vast and monumental sculptures since the late 1960s. Living out in the desert in Hiko, Nevada, his reputation has shot up in recent years with major exhibitions taking place across the world.
Born in California in 1944, it was not until moving to New York that Michael Heizer began fully concentrating on making art, especially painting and sculpture. His artworks were included in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York as early as 1969, his contribution being a huge photograph of a painting. By the late 60s he transferred to the deserts of Nevada and began producing work that could never be exhibited in a gallery setting. Moving American art into the great outdoors, Heizer’s huge trench, Double Negative, was a 15-meter wide gash in the Sierra Nevada desert which required 240,000 tons of rock to be removed.
By the early 70s Michael Heizer began buying acres of land in Garden Valley with the premise of creating a modernist complex filled with pits, arenas, and ramps. The vast scope of the project forced Heizer to put it on hold, but was kick started again in the 1990s. Stretching over a mile long, City as it has become known, fuses ancient and modern forms. Its continuity and vastness means it has to be experienced over time and distance. The work is still not open to the public.
Michael Heizer is highly-sought after and his limited edition multiple is a rare chance to own a piece of work from this great American artist. He played a prominent role in documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany in 1977 and in 1984 he was included in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and he exhibited in the Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy in 1996.
