Object Type Medium Support Style Artist Creation Date Choose one Architecture Assemblage Cartoon drawing Collage Construction Drawing Drawing and limited edition print Drawing, textile Exhibition Site Installation Montage Painting Painting (relief) Photograph Photograph and audio Photograph and drawing Photograph, collage Portfolio for photographs Print Print Print (altered) Print on canvas Print with drawing Print with hand-coloring Print with hand-painting Print with objects Print, collage Print, drawing Print, photograph Prints Sculpture Sculpture (multiple) Textile Video Wall relief

Michael Heizer

• Medium:Sculpture, Painting
• Nationality:

  USA

• Life Dates:

  (Berkeley, CA, 1944 - )

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Michael Heizer was born on November 4, 1944 in Berkeley, California. His father, Robert Heizer, was a respected anthropologist and archaeologist, a professor at the University of California. His grandfathers, Olaf Jenkins and Ott Heizer, were respectively a geologist and a mining engineer. Initially a painter, Heizer attended the San Francisco Art Institute in 1963-64, then moved to New York. In 1967, with fellow artist Walter de Maria, he traveled back into the west, to Nevada and the Mojave Desert, and began to create large sculptural works, digging into and forming great areas of earth. His most famous work, Double Negative (1969), consists of two trenches 50 feet deep and 30 feet wide and totaling 1,500 feet in length cut into the slopes of Mormon Mesa in Nevada. In the United States and abroad, Heizer collaborated with other early Environmental artists. In 1970-72, he began construction on City, a huge and somewhat mysterious project in the remote Nevada desert that has occupied him to the present day. In addition to his Earthworks, Heizer has created large sculptures of stone or concrete and paintings, which appear in many public sites and collections. His work has been shown at the Venice Biennale; the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Heizer lives and works in Lincoln County, Nevada, on a property near City.

Photo by Peter Lindbergh, Courtesy of the Artist.