Walter de Maria

Walter de Maria  

“All artistic activity is a fight against time… a gesture against finitude and towards the infinite”

A cultivator of thunderstorms, Walter DE MARIA leaves behind him one of the strongest works in the field of Land Art.

He is known worldwide for his land installation at Quedamo, New Mexico, entitled Lightning Field with 400 sharply pointed six-metre high steel columns that attract lightning and create, when the weather permits, a bright and stunning spectacle. This monumental installation has profoundly changed our way of appreciating art as an aesthetic, spatial and temporal experience, and it makes poetry out of the elements of our real world. Since its inception in 1977, the work-site-monument been a destination for artistic pilgrimages organized by the Dia Art Foundation. Although the experience is less dramatic when the weather is not stormy, it nevertheless works perfectly as minimalist art since the metal poles planted at regular intervals structure the space and react to the light.

Walter de Maria was an artist at the crossroads of Land Art and minimalism. In fact, not all his work is intended to make sense within a landscape. If his convictions led him to stay away from the market system, he was nevertheless supported by the Gagosian Gallery and some of his works can be found on the auction circuit.

In 1986, Sotheby’s sold 44 works from the collection of New Yorker Robert C. Scull who was known for his acquisitions of Pop artists, but also for allowing Walter de Maria to produce his first metal works as of 1965. That same year, Contemporary art lovers flocked to New Mexico to visit the Lightning Field that was the subject of an article by the journalist and art critic Kristine McKenna, published on the website of the Los Angeles Times on 9 November 1986 (Musings on the Lightning Field). The article was extremely timely… just days before the three-day sale of Robert C. Scull’s works at Sotheby’s which included 10 works by Walter de Maria. This was the first and last time that collectors were offered such a rich selection of works by this particularly rare signature on the auction market. The ten works all sold at least at their high estimates. Some elicited strong bidding such a Candle Piece (1965, 35.5cm x 28cm x 17.5 cm) that started from a low estimate of $10,000 and reached $45,000 (11 November 1986).

Cage II, a sort of metal jail transformed into an elegant and rhythmic abstraction, is a more iconic work than Candle Piece created the same year. The work fetched $57,500 on 12 November 1986 at Sotheby’s. Today it would fetch at least four times that price. There are two copies of Cage II, one of which was given to the MoMA by Agnes Gund and Lily Auchincloss. The artist created and named the work in honour of John Cage, whose theories on modern music and compositional structures influenced his minimalist structures.

Since these sales in 1986, forty lots have been offered at auctions, including a collage in the first half of 2013 (Razor Piece, 1971) which fetched £1,500 ($2,297) at Christie’s in London on 17 April, and one print in 2012 (Picasso – Africa) which sold for €260 ($331) at Jeschke – Van Vliet in Berlin on 16 November. His major works are rare and their prices are constantly inflating. The best example is that of the artist’s personal auction record for a work composed of seven pure shapes in metal entitled Circle/Rectangle 7, the price of which soared 209% in less than ten years (it sold for $155,000 in 1998 at Christie’s and then $480,000 in 2007 at Sotheby’s).

Walter De Maria died on Thursday, 25 July 2013, in Los Angeles at the age of 77. His in situ works will be open to the public as long as the foundations and patrons maintain them. However his Apollo’s Ecstasy (1990) is currently on show at the Arsenal in the 55th Venice Biennial only until 24 November 2013.