Walter De Maria. 1999 Milano 2000

Walter De Maria (Albany, California 1935) is one of the artists who have had the greatest influence on the stylistic orientation of contemporary artists from the 1960s onwards. From 1959 to 1961 he took part in happenings and made Minimal and Conceptual works.
Subsequently, he was one of the first artists to address the relationship between art and the natural environment. In 1968 he undertook a reconnaissance of the American territory and travelled over its vast expanses in order to find a new aesthetic and experience other dimensions of perception.
He conceived the idea of intervening directly in the landscape using bulldozers and other earth-moving vehicles as artist's tools. He affirmed that natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes and sandstorms were "…the highest form of art possible to experience".

His first earth sculpture project was Walls in the Desert (1961-63), a creative hypothesis that foreshadowed the international Land Art movement, while his most famous and largest work is Lightning Field of 1977, a permanent installation located in New Mexico comprising four hundred pointed stainless steel rods over 6 metres high that, during the frequent thunderstorms, because of the facility with which they attract lightning, give rise to the complete fusion of the artistic process with natural phenomena.