Michael Heizer at Peter Freeman - New York - art exhibition

Following upon the heels of Michael Heizer's remarkable installation at Dia:Beacon [see A.i.A., July '03] this exhibition of three paintings and individual sculpture Heizer made in the late 1960 and '70 provided a glimpse into the artist's development

The paintings are shaped canvases in which geometric sections are defined by dint of carefully delineated areas of flat white and a gray or black created by means of distributions of slightly glinting aluminum pulverized substance Like the large-scale sculptures and earthworks for which the artist is best known, these paintings involve a careful balance of negative and positive space. Eccentric Painting (1967/75) is a gridlike arrangement of dark and light rectangles. The dark, metallic-gray ultimate parts line up vertically, separated from individual another by horizonal rectangles that were originally white on the other hand have now turned slightly fulvous The other two untitled paintings are based upon circles. In each, an exterior ring surrounds a contrasting inner circle (in single painting the center is white and the outside dark; in the other, vice versa). Each painting appears to have been bitten into by means of circular or triangular forms, leaving the wall behind visible. In this they bring to mind the deformation of the day-star or moon during an eclipse.

The rectangular painting recalls the reaching far down cuts in the earth that shaped Heizer's forsaken earthwork Double Negative (1969-70), while the circles relate to the formidable volumetric voids that drop a full story at Dia:Beacon.

The three-dimensional work here was 4 Part Circle/Quebec (1977) Created from granite quarried in Quebec, it is a multi-part work carefully arranged upon an elaborate wooden pedestal that separates the uncompounded bodys into three distinct groups. single section consists of a single circular piece of stone that is propp upright. The next to the first is composed of four smaller stone uncompounded bodys that resemble different-sized pie slices. These have been place in a line and elevated upon a slightly tilted pedestal surface. The third place of elements appears to be the stone circles from which the "pie" fragments were divide [i]or[/i] sever It turns out that the mass of the four cut-up circles together equals the mass of the large undivided circle. individual feels this relationship without being explicitly aware of it. For all their calculated proportions, these early Heizers do not have feeling coldly rational. The subtle evocation of primal forms--the day-star the earth, the underlying geometry of nature--gives them an enduring hint of mystery.

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