PRESS RELEASE Philosophy in the Land II We are extremely pleased to announce a one-person show of works from the 1960s to the present by the pioneering conceptual artist Agnes Denes. This exhibition marks the first presentation of vintage photographs made by the artist, documenting her groundbreaking environmental and philosophical projects. In the late 1960s Agnes Denes began to develop a philosophically-based, ecologically–concerned, artistic practice that was highly distinctive in terms of its aesthetics and deep engagement with science and socio-political ideas. Approximately one hundred photographs in color and black & white will be on view including images of Denes’s first ecological work, Rice/Tree/Burial, created in 1968 and re-enacted on a larger scale a decade later; photographs from Human Dust (1969) and the iconic color photographs depicting the various stages of Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982), her best-known piece and a pivotal work in the history of Land Art. Agnes Denes is also known for her innovative use of metallic inks and other nontraditional materials in creating exquisitely rendered drawings and prints linking conceptual art to philosophy, science, mathematics and the many other disciplines that she has explored during her long and distinguished career. The exhibition will also feature a selection of drawings and prints from the 1960s to the present. In 1968 Denes announced her commitment to environmental issues when she created Rice/Tree/Burial in Sullivan County, N.Y. According to the renowned art historian and curator Peter Selz it was “probably the first site-specific piece anywhere with ecological concerns.” Denes later wrote: "I planted rice, chained trees, and buried my poetry without retaining a copy. These three acts represented initiation and life-giving, interference with natural processes and systems, and the relinquishing of something personal and precious to the ground. “In 1977 she installed an expanded version of this seminal work at Artpark in Lewiston, N.Y., planting rice that grew in a mutated state (the unforeseen result of soil contamination), chaining trees on the site of a sacred Native American forest and burial ground, and camping out for seven days and nights on a ledge that eventually crumbled away while shooting images of Niagara Falls that added “the forces of nature, as a fourth element to this cycle of dialectics.” The piece concluded with the burial of a time capsule containing the microfilmed responses to a questionnaire on human values that she sent to individuals in places where she had exhibited and lectured all over the globe. Human Dust (1969) consisting of the calcified residue of cremated human remains, with a poetic text on human life reduced to statistical data on one individual, is part of a long investigation that culminated in the Book of Dust (The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter) (1989). According to the artist, “Book of Dust glances at the history and the future of the universe to bring human existence into sharp-focus perspective . . . from cosmic dust to human dust; and from molecules to intelligence . . . Dust is the metaphorical thread connecting facts and phenomena for a momentary, contemplative scrutiny.” The scholar and curator Jeffrey Weiss has called Wheatfield – A Confrontation “perpetually astonishing . . . one of Land art's great transgressive masterpieces.” Following a year of preparation, Denes installed the piece, with the support of the Public Art Fund, during a four-month period in the spring and summer of 1982, planting a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. This visual paradox engendered by Denes’s monumental conflation of nature and culture, represented, in her words “food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics,” and “mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns.” The piece yielded nearly 1,000 pounds of wheat that were harvested and distributed throughout the world. Denes’s Wheatfield was re-created this past summer as a special feature of the exhibition Radical Nature at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. Agnes Denes was born in Hungary in 1931, raised in Sweden, and educated in the US. She has participated in numerous solo and group shows at museums and galleries and has created monumental public works throughout the world. Works by Agnes Denes are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and other important institutions. The gallery is located at 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, on the sixth floor. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. |