Walter De Maria

Working at the forefront of Minimalism, Conceptualism, and land art, Walter De Maria created ambitious outdoor installations and sublime sculptures built on basic geometries and repetitions. His seminal 1977 work The Lightning Field features 400 stainless steel poles arranged in a grid in the deserts of New Mexico. De Maria studied painting at the University of California at Berkeley and quickly turned his attention to sculpture. He made Minimalist pieces from wood and steel while exploring media such as performance, film, and music (he was also a proto-member of the Velvet Underground). De Maria began experimenting with land art in the late 1960s, exploring notions of perception: He filled a New York loft with 280,000 pounds of soil, accentuated the flatness of the Mojave Desert by drawing parallel chalk lines across its surface, and extended a one-kilometer-tall brass rod into the sky above Kassel, Germany. De Maria has been the subject of solo shows at Moderna Museet, the Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Fondazione Prada, among other institutions. At auction, his work has commanded prices in the six figures.