Land Art

With the term Land Art, art historiography sought to define a very vast and diversified American and European movement which has developed to the present day since 1967. It includes a very large number of artists: from Robert Smithson to Richard Long, from Michael Heizer to Amish Fulton, from Dennis Oppenheim to Andy Goldsworthy, from Walter De Maria to Giuseppe Penone, from Gordon Matta-Clark to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. In reality, each of these artists has rejected or rejects this historiographical label.

Following the measurement of a painting, we can overcome its dimension, we can go beyond, over and above. We go beyond the traditional canvas through a cut. In Land Art, that two-dimensional surface, that diaphragm has dissolved, we go beyond. Overcoming that conventional space, we no longer have any screen, neither representative nor symbolic: we return to direct contact with the world, with reality, with nature.

“The work of art is no longer the pictorial representation of a landscape, but the landscape itself” Gerry Schum.

Our glances, our feet, are back on the ground. We rediscover the immense presence of the landscape. Our legs retrace paths, woods, steppes, mountains, hills. Our eyes see immense horizons. Our hands touch the essence of the world again. The great presence of the plain, immobile, exterminated. The canvas is the earth itself. Nature as an immense surface, vast clay, with and on which to work. The magic of a place: space, measure, shape, vision. The texture, the fascination of the stones, the grass, the fields and the deserts.

“Instead of putting a work of art in a place, a place can become a work of art.” Robert Smithson