Michael Heizer

Michael Heizer, together with the artists Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, is one of the founders of the American Land Art movement, which, around 1968, radically changed the concept of the artwork and the exhibition space, abandoning the limits imposed by closed spaces and intervening in the land with the same materials as those of the environment of the area, such as the soil and rocks of the desert.
Heizer's artistic career, which began in New York around 1965-66 with abstract paintings on shaped canvases, developed from 1977 onwards, when the artist decided to work in the immense deserts of the west, the ideal settings for his principal Land Art works.
He started to travel through Nevada and the Mojave Desert in search of suitable sites and soils, rock engravings and the architecture of the Native Americans, as well as the temple and ritual structures of the Mesa Verde.

The result was the earthworks, which, although they tended to deteriorate with the passage of time, especially due to weathering and modifications to the landscape, became the symbol of a form of American art that was in marked contrast to that of European origin, attempting to proceed beyond the traditional categories of painting and sculpture. Heizer's art endeavours to rediscover a material, the soil, and its physical, environmental and territorial components.
Although rooted in the sacred rituals of the Olmecs and Incas, the action inspiring it is an expression of modern American culture, which is capable of introducing the magnetism of nature into the body of art.
Where the environment is the protagonist, says the artist, "the subject is architecture, the result is sculpture".