With an assertive anti-academism, replacing the elaborate, polished, finely sculpted work with earth or raw stone, and the grace and lightness required since Antiquity with the mass and chaos of voids, the vertigo and dichotomy of spaces, Michael Heizer shows us the clash of the Titans, that of stone against steel, in Rock/Steel, a series of monumental sculptures begun five years ago. The series has now been completed with five new sculptures and five new works on paper that are designed to confound all our perceptions: set in gigantic angular steel structures, enormous rocks, like megalithic ready-made that could evoke some science-fiction Stone Age vessel, seem to levitate and crush us with all their weight (from 13 to 23 tons, or even 27 to 40 with their steel case), while enlarged images of volcanic ejecta, silk-screened, sprayed with gouache and reworked with paint sticks and pencils, plunge us into blurred spaces with no bottom and no horizon. An unsettling experience of changing scales and space-time displacement.
« Michael Heizer » – Galerie Gagosian
522 West 21st Street, New York (États-Unis)
Until 16 April
https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2022/michael-heizer
Stéphanie Dulout
