Gagosian is pleased to present two floor sculptures and a set of related drawings by Walter De Maria. This will be the first solo exhibition of De Maria’s work at Gagosian Paris, and it has been prepared in collaboration with the estate of Walter De Maria.
A vanguard force within four major art historical movements—minimalism, conceptual art, land art, and installation art—De Maria’s oeuvre uses mathematical absolutes and elements of the sublime to push the boundaries of the traditional white cube.
In the early 1990s, De Maria conceived of, and partially constructed, Truth / Beauty, a series of fourteen sculptures in seven pairs. Completed after De Maria’s death by the Estate according to his vision, the series expands upon his use of permutations of rods, polygons, and numerical sequences intended to be viewed in a counterclockwise progression.
The earliest work in the exhibition is a series of drawings, The Pure Polygon Series (1975–76). This includes seven hand-drawn pencil drawings that begin with a triangle and follow with six additional shapes in succession. Faintly traced lines on 36-inch square American etching paper encourage intimate viewing, a level of physical engagement akin to that motivated by De Maria’s sculpture.
Walter De Maria was born in 1935 in Albany, California, and died in 2013 in Los Angeles. His work is collected by public institutions including The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Dia Art Foundation, New York; MUMOK, Vienna; Magasin III, Stockholm; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Menil Collection, Houston; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include “Walter De Maria: The 2000 Sculpture,” Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland (1992, traveled to Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, in 2000; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, in 2012); “Walter De Maria: 1999 Milano 2000,” Fondazione Prada, Milan (1999–2000); “Walter De Maria Retrospective,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2003); and “Walter De Maria: Trilogies,” The Menil Collection, Houston (2011).
