Displaying items by tag: walter de maria

Fondazione Prada, an Italian institution dedicated to contemporary art and culture, will unveil its expanded headquarters in Milan in May 2015. Established by the fashion power couple Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli in 1993, Fondazione Prada focuses on art, cinema, design, architecture, and philosophy. Instead of exhibiting studio work, the foundation helps artists produce site-specific projects that they have always dreamed of constructing. Fondazione Prada has organized exhibitions with a swath of celebrated artists, including Anish Kapoor, Dan Flavin, Louise Bourgeois, John Baldessari, and Walter de Maria.

Fondazione Prada has selected OMA, the firm co-founded by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, to helm the expansion project, which will turn a former industrial complex from the early twentieth-century into Milan’s largest contemporary art gallery.

New York’s Gagosian Gallery is currently presenting an exhibition of sculptures and works on paper by the late American artist Walter De Maria. A pioneer of conceptual art, installation art, land art, and Minimalism, De Maria continuously pushed the boundaries of what contemporary art looked like and how it was displayed.

Last month, Gagosian Gallery announced that it had acquired De Maria’s estate and planned to establish the Walter De Maria Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to managing the artist’s rights and reproductions, advising on curatorial matters, and overseeing the preparation of a major monograph. Elizabeth Childress, former director of the De Maria studio, and current director of the Walter De Maria Collection and Archives, said, “Walter so wished to establish his own foundation, but sadly he did not accomplish this during his lifetime. It is an important step to have this entity as both a protection and a promotion of his legacy.”       

The Dia Art Foundation is well known for its stewardship of two of the greatest pieces of American land art: Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” in Utah and Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field” in New Mexico.

In 2015, after years of planning, it will open an ambitious new long-term project that is intended to ask provocative questions about what “American” means and to push the boundaries of the foundation’s roots in the Minimalist and Conceptual movements of the 1960s and ’70s.

The estate of Walter De Maria, the reclusive US artist who died last year without leaving a will, is now represented by Gagosian Gallery (FL, C3; FM, C2). Best known for large-scale installations such as "The New York Earth Room," 1977, and "The Lightning Field," 1977, in New Mexico, De Maria had six solo shows with the gallery during his lifetime. Gagosian is due to mark the new relationship by staging an exhibition of Minimalist sculptures and works on paper that were created by the artist between 1976 and 1990.

The building at 421 E. 6th Street looks unassuming enough. It’s still got the facade of the Con Ed substation that it was in the 1920s, and chances are, if you’re strolling by on the way to Tompkins Square Park, you probably wouldn’t stop and stare.

But inside, the gigantic space is filled with the minimalist installations of Walter De Maria, who purchased the lot in 1980 and turned it into his studio and home that he occupied and built upon until his death last year. He transformed the building into a work of art itself, perhaps the encapsulation of his entire career and life.