MICHAEL HEIZER

Working largely outside the confines of gallery and museum, Michael Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. A pioneer of Land Art, he is renowned for awe-inspiring sculptures and earthworks made with earth-moving equipment, which he began creating in the American West in 1967. Double Negative (1969–70), a pair of massive cuts in facing cliff edges of an obscure mesa near Overton, Nevada, was made by displacing 240,000 tons of rock. On permanent view at Dia:Beacon, North, East, South, West (1967/2002) consists of four geometric depressions, each sinking twenty feet below the gallery floor. City, a vast ongoing site in Central Eastern Nevada that Heizer has been working on since 1972, comprises giant earthworks inspired by ancient architectural ruins. Levitated Mass, a permanent, site-specific commission for LACMA, was unveiled in the summer of 2012.