EL SOURDOG HEX e.V. will be presenting work by the American artist Michael Heizer from July 7th until August 30th 2008.

Michael Heizer was born in Berkeley, California in 1944 and grew up accompanying his father on archaeological expeditions to Yucatán and Egypt. He has always been drawn to landscape areas most people think of as exotic. He feels particularly at home in the desert landscapes of California and Nevada. His paternal grandfather was director of the largest silver mine in Nevada and his maternal grandfather was general manager of numerous mines in California. Soil, stone and sand are self-evident working materials to Heizer, who never set out to create traditional art in traditional mediums. Since the beginning of his career, Heizer has always expressed an interest in extremes. In 1969, Heizer journeyed 130 kilometres beyond Las Vegas's city limits to create Double Negative (1969/70), consisting of a 10 by 15 metre excavation and spanning a total 450 metres of Nevada desert valley. The project required the redistribution of 40,000 tons of sand and rocks in 1969 followed by a further 200,000 tons in 1970. He deemed it a "negative" artwork, because it was made purely by digging out and piling mounds of earth, and used no outside materials.
At 18, Heizer began his training in 1963 at the San Francisco Art Institute, initially working expressionistically and figuratively. After his first series of expressionistic paintings, he moved on to abstract-geometric work. In 1964, he completed his first abstract-geometric shaped canvases, which featured car paint applied to plywood. When asked why he moved from San Francisco to New York in 1965 he answered, "To make art. I had heard that New York was the only place you could do that." Heizer started working on landscape pieces in the late 1960s. He created the "Nine Nevada Depressions" in 1968, digging and forging a group of rectangular, looping and intersecting depressions in the Nevada desert that were spread or, as Heizer would say, linked throughout an area that spanned a distance of 780 kilometres. Due to the eradicating effects of wind and weather, the work has long since worn away.

In 1971, Heizer returned to working in traditional art forms such as painting, sculpture, drawing and etching. While his early work almost exclusively consisted of rectangles and squares, the newer pieces were dominated by ovals and circles. As in earlier works, some of the painted canvases were sometimes slashed.
The object-like character of these paintings was particularly accentuated by their shape, the unusual forms and the application of paint. Heizer applied the colored matter quickly with a paint roller, which in some cases would cover the subsurface entirely. In other instances the background would shine through, always to reveal the colors of the desert; dark ochre, violet, olive green, rust brown and lead gray.
In 1976, Heizer began producing sculptures that utilized woods such as mahogany, rosewood, ebony and nut wood. They all followed the same initial pattern in that they consisted of seven or eight segments taken from a circular shaped, sawn-off slice of wood. The segments were separated either lengthways or laterally, along the diameter, the radius or a grain of the initial slice. The construction process did not, however, follow a set plan; whoever installed the sculptures was able to choose between a more or less accidental arrangement and a formal composition. Heizer's conceptual creations gradually gave way to autonomous work.
As Heizer stated in 1977: "I don't think of myself as an artist who is motivated by a need for self-expression. I feel I am performing a function for society. I think my work is important."

Works cited:
Baumueller, Barbara. Inszenierte Natur: Landschaftskunst im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, 1997.
Kipphoff, Petra. "Das Große und die Leere," Die Zeit 17/1992.
Michael Heizer. Museum Folkwang Essen, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller Otterlo, 1979.
Rosen, Philip. Michael Heizer: Outside and Inside the White Cube, Munich 2005.

Exhibition:
July 7th – August 30th, 2008
Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 6pm
Admission is free