Michael Heizer is an American land art artist and sculptor. He has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process.
Background
Michael Heizer was born on November 4, 1944 in Berkeley, California, United States. His parents were Robert Fleming Heizer and Nancy Elizabeth Jenkins. The Heizers lived in Nevada from the 1880s.
One of Michael's grandfathers, Ott F. Heizer, was a mining engineer, the other, Olaf P. Jenkins, was the chief geologist in California.
Michael Heizer's father, Robert F. Heizer, an outstanding archaeologist specializing in the Greater Basin region, spent his childhood in Nevada, the small town of Lovelock, but most of his scientific career was connected with the University of California at Berkeley, where Robert taught for almost thirty years and and authored numerous influential books, particularly about Native American culture in the W.
Education
Michael never finished high school, dropping out after a year abroad in France.
He also briefly attended the San Francisco Art Institute from 1963 to 1964, but moved to New York in 1966.
Career
Heizer began his artistic career in New York in 1966 with a series of geometric canvases. The works of that period are "Trapezoid Painting" (1966) and "Track Painting" (1967).
In the late 1960s, Heizer left New York City for the deserts of California and Nevada, where he began making his first "negative" sculptures. With colleague Walter de Maria, Heizer created a new genre of "land art" or "earth art," which used the earth as its medium.
In 1972 Heizer began construction on a massive installation known as "City" in the rural desert of Lincoln County, Nevada. Nevertheless, he has continued to produce sculptures and paintings on a smaller scale. His works have been featured in numerous solo exhibitions: most prominently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and more recently at the Gagosian Gallery in New York.
Heizer was diagnosed with a neurological disorder known as polyneuropathy, which reduced his ability to use his hands, in 1995. Despite this, Heizer continues work on his magnum opus "City" to this day.
Besides, Heizer completed "Levitated Mass" in 2012. His most recent work is "Tangential Circular Negative Line" in Mauvoisin, Switzerland, commissioned by Fondation Air&Art directed by Jean Maurice Varone.
Michael Heizer splits his time between New York City and Nevada.
Achievements
Michael Heizer was one of the first American artists to move art outdoors. He pioneered the genre of Land art or Earth art. His use of the earth as both material and setting, along with his massive scale, paved the way for younger artists such as James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy and Maya Lin.
Heizer was included in Earth Works, the influential group show at Virginia Dwan's gallery, in 1968, and then in the Whitney Museum painting annual in 1969, where his contribution was a huge photograph of a dye painting in the desert.
For his first one-person show, at the Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich in 1969, he removed 1,000 tons of earth in a conical shape to create Munich Depression. In 1977, he was included in documenta 6, Kassel. Major exhibitions of his work have been staged at institutions such as the Museum Folkwang, Essen (1979), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1984), and Fondazione Prada, Milan (1996).
Quotations:
"I think earth is the material with the most potential because it is the original source material."
“I never even considered people anyway. You make art for people to look at, of course, so maybe you presume people are going to go there one day. But not a lot of them - it ain’t gonna happen. Millions of people go to the movies and they’re so proud, but none of those things relate to this. It may from the outside look like a spectacle in the making, but it isn’t. I’m a quiet man. I just make art.”
Personality
In childhood Heizer was a "straight F student anyway", with few friends, and little interest in sports.
Alter, during his career, Michael shunned media attention and was seen by his peers as a recluse, but he preferred it that way. He referred to himself as "self-entertaining", a person who didn't need friends or critics to provide feedback.
Interests
Sport
Connections
Heizer's first wife was Barbara. His second wife and former assistant was Mary Shanahan. In 2015 Michael and Mary split, and he has been living and working in the Nevada desert with only his dog, Tomato Rose, by his side.
