MICHAEL HEIZER

Among the artist’s most complex negative line sculptures, Convoluted Line A and Convoluted Line B are winding steel earth liners inserted into a raised concrete floor. Curved with the delicacy of a drawn line, they reflect the artist’s interest in precise mark making at monumental scale and the possibilities of line as sculptural form. Conceived with the gallery’s spacious interior in mind and placed in relation to one another, they span 85 1/2 feet in length and form a unified environment that encourages experiential viewing.

Heizer’s ongoing inquiry into the formal possibilities of line, size, and negative space began in the 1960s with shaped canvases composed with lighter and darker geometric passages to suggest the absence and presence of form. In 1967, he began employing these concepts in three-dimensional sculptures, cutting into the earth. Early negative line sculptures include the Nine Nevada Depressions (1968, no longer extant), multiple excavations in the form of loops, intersections, zigzags, and broken lines across 520 miles of terrain, escalating in Double Negative (1969), two 50-foot-deep cuts into two opposing mesa walls near the Virgin River in Nevada.

Although the Nine Nevada Depressions have deteriorated or been dismantled, in the 1970s, Heizer began making weathering steel versions of them. These included Dissipate (1968/1970), Rift (1968/1982), and Isolated Mass/Circumflex (2) (1968/1978) (Menil Collection, Houston). He also returned to early works such as Compression Line (1968/2016) (Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland), a concave steel negative sculpture with bowed walls forced to “kiss” by the pressure of the surrounding soil that was first made in wood in 1968. The elegant curves of the new works on view at Gagosian culminate Heizer’s investigation into the physical limitations of rigid steel and its resulting aesthetic potential.

From 1970 to 2022, Heizer also built the City. Located in Central Eastern Nevada, the work includes mounds and depressions delineated by snaking concrete curbs. To experience the City, visitors must traverse its difficult terrain, and surrender to its sublime vastness, scale, and solitude. Convoluted Line A and Convoluted Line B recall the_City_’s winding paths; likewise, the relationship of the viewer’s body to the sculptures’ scale is key to their sensorial impact.

In 2022, Heizer was invited to participate in the construction of Saudi Arabia’s new cultural destination Wadi AlFann (Valley of the Arts) in the AlUla desert. There he will install a series of architecturally scaled linear engravings in the lineage of petroglyphs carved into the sandstone rock face.__