Walter De Maria

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Walter De Maria (actually Walter Joseph De Maria ; born October 1, 1935 in Albany , California , † July 25, 2013 in Los Angeles ) was an American artist , an important exponent of Minimalism , Conceptual Art and Land Art .

Life

Vertical earth kilometer

Walter De Maria studied history from 1953 at the University of California, Berkeley . After completing his BA in 1957, he studied painting there with David Park ( MFA 1959). In 1960 De Maria moved to New York, where he lived until his death. He took part in the 4th documenta in Kassel in 1968, and was represented as an artist at Documenta 5 (1972) and Documenta 6 in 1977.

In 1968 De Maria presented an Earth Room to an astonished audience - for the first time in Germany - in the Munich gallery of Heiner Friedrich and Franz Dahlem at Maximilianstrasse 15, then also in a newly established branch in Cologne, a gallery that Walter De Maria had at 50 m³ of earth had filled. A proposal by Friedrich to install a vertical kilometer of earth by Walter De Maria as part of the art program for the 1972 Olympic Games was rejected by the Munich city administration. The project of the vertical earth kilometer was only realized at Documenta 6 in 1977 .

In addition to Minimal Art, Concept Art and Land Art, De Maria's creative and experimental interests also included performance, film and music. As a 'proto member' he played in the group The Velvet Underground. His best-known film Hard Core (1969) is a very impressive homage to Land Art in connection with a duel between two western cowboys in high noon style. In all aesthetic concepts and designs, the artist was primarily concerned with the simplicity and intensity of expression.

De Maria's studio house at 421 East 6th Street

In 1977 Heiner Friedrich moved his gallery to New York. The first exhibition was again dedicated to Walther De Maria and the Earth Room , which has been a permanent installation under the title The New York Earth Room since 1977. He wanted "[...] to counter the high-speed exhibition business in which one show chased the next [...] with something lasting."

For Walter De Maria, the Dia Art Foundation bought a 75 square kilometer site near Quemado, New Mexico , in order to build his installation Lightning Field with 400 stainless steel rods over a width of one kilometer and a length of one mile. The stelae, pointed at the top, have a diameter of 5 centimeters and a height between 8.14 m and 4.6 m. In doing so, they evened out the irregular terrain and formed a common height. The work was completed in 1977.

In the late 1970s, De Maria bought a former Con Edison substation in New York at 42 East 6th Street, along with an empty property next door, and in 1980 converted it into a residential, exhibition and studio building. With the purchase of 87 works from the former Ströher collection , the world's largest group of works by De Maria's sculptures came to the MMK Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main. Further works were acquired later. After De Maria's death, the property was sold to billionaire and art collector Peter Brant for $ 27 million in 2014 .

In addition to immaterial works of conceptual art , De Maria's oeuvre includes sculptures , installations and works of land art.

In 2001 De Maria was awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize .

Works (selection)

  • 1965: Water Water Water (conceptual landscape drawing)
  • 1965: Silver Portrait of Dorian Gray (sculpture)
  • 1965: Cage (sculpture), Museum of Modern Art MMK, Frankfurt a. M.
  • 1966: Pyramid Chair , (sculpture made of V-steel and patent leather), Museum of Modern Art MMK, Frankfurt a. M.
  • 1966/1991: 4-6-8 Series , (chrome-plated steel sculpture, 27 parts), Museum of Modern Art MMK, Frankfurt a. M.
  • 1966 : High Energy Bar (steel sculpture), Museum of Modern Art MMK, Frankfurt a. M.
  • 1968: Mile Long Parallel Walls In The Desert ( Land Art Project)
  • 1968: Sphinx , (Land Art Project), Hamburg
  • 1968: Münchner Erdraum (installation) The installation consisted of 50 cubic meters of cleanly raked and smoothed peat waste.
  • after 1968: seen as the New York Earth Room in SoHo , Manhattan for more than 50 years .
  • 1969: Las Vegas Piece (Land Art Installation)
  • 1969: Two Lines Three Circles on the Desert (Fernsehgalerie Berlin Gerry Schum )
  • 1972: Triangle, Circle, Square (aluminum sculptures), Museum of Modern Art MMK, Frankfurt a. M.
  • 1974–1977: The Lightning Field (Land Art Installation) North of New Mexico, 400 sharpened steel bars were erected on an area of ​​over one square kilometer, which were to become a cosmic transformer station on a thunderstorm day.
  • 1977: Vertical earth kilometer (installation as part of documenta 6 ) On Friedrichsplatz in Kassel , Walter De Maria had a vertical hole drilled and filled the hole with solid brass rods 5 cm in diameter, which were inserted one kilometer into one another and permanently embedded in the earth.
  • 1979: The Broken Kilometer (installation, New York)
  • 1976–1977 and 1982: Equal Area Series # 14, 15, 16 " (installation DASMAXIMUM KunstGegenwart Traunreut )
  • 1985: 5 continents sculpture (installation, Stuttgart ) 325 tons of marble and quartz fragments from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America were stored in a 75 cm high glazed steel frame.
  • 1988: Beginning and End of Infinity (Installation, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart ) In a darkened hall, fifty half-meter-long solid brass cylinders as a four-ton gold line rested on ten narrow white plinths.
  • 1999–2000: The 2000 Sculpture (installation, Kunsthaus Zürich , 1992) 2000 pieces of plaster symbolized the year 2000.
  • 2002: Large Red Sphere (installation, Türkentor (Munich) )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. New York Times: Walter De Maria, Artist on Grand Scale, Dies at 77 , accessed June 25, 2019.
  2. Laura Weissmüller: No word on art. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. July 8, 2011.
  3. ^ Eva Ehninger: Land Art as a film. Parallels of spatial construction in Land Art and Film with Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft , 55/1 (2010), 109–127.
  4. ART: Time of Blindness . In: Der Spiegel. 7/1985, November 18, 1985.
  5. Susanna Partsch: The 101 most important questions: modern art . CH Beck, 2005 ISBN 978-3-40651128-8 , p. 77
  6. ^ Franz Meyer: Walter de Maria , writings on the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main 1991. ISBN 9783882704549
  7. Peter Iden , Rolf Lauter (ed.): Pictures for Frankfurt. Inventory catalog of the Museum of Modern Art. Munich 1985, pp. 90f, 179-181. ISBN 978-3-7913-0702-2
  8. See website MMK [1]
  9. ^ Walter De Maria's Grand and Gritty Home . In: The New York Times, January 31, 2014
  10. It is one of De Maria's first sculptures with serial elements, the 1966 version consisting of 18 elements, each with a 4, 6 and 8-sided metal rod, attached to a metal base. The bars were distributed according to the combinatorial principle. In order to represent the complete number of combinatorial possibilities, De Maria had the 9 elements that were missing up until then refilled in 1991 at the request of the MMK. See collection text 1991 by Rolf Lauter (museum archive)
  11. Munich Earth
  12. a b c d e Hans-Joachim Müller: He designed the beginning and end of infinity. Die Welt, July 29, 2013, accessed August 24, 2013 .
  13. How to make art out of a flash in FAZ of July 31, 2013, page 30
  14. ^ The Lightning Field
  15. The Broken Kilometers