Michael Heizer (born 1944 in the United States) is one of the central figures of land art, the movement that emerged in the 1960s and took sculpture out into the landscape. He is considered one of the pioneers of Earthworks and is known for large-scale works made with earthmoving equipment, far from galleries and museums.
Heizer began his career in New York in 1966 with geometric canvases painted with PVA latex. In Trapezoid Painting (1966) and Track Painting (1967) he painted the raw edges of the canvases black, leaving the white interiors to read as negative space. These hard-edged "displacement paintings" foreshadow his later interest in the relationship between presence and absence, matter and space.
By the late 1960s he had moved to the deserts of California and Nevada, where he began his "negative" sculptures, cut into the ground. Nine Nevada Depressions, made in dry lakes across the state, and the Primitive Dye Paintings, with lime powder and dyes scattered over the desert, led to Double Negative (1969). This work consists of two trenches about 15 meters deep cut into the edge of Mormon Mesa near Overton, Nevada, for which roughly 240,000 tons of rock were displaced.
He later explored combinations of stone and concrete, as in Adjacent, Against, Upon (1976), and the earthwork Effigy Tumuli (1983-85) in Illinois, on an abandoned strip-mine site. In 2012 he completed Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a boulder of about 340 tons set on an inclined walkway that visitors pass beneath.
Since the early 1970s he has worked on City, a vast complex in the rural desert of Lincoln County, Nevada, which opened to limited public access in 2022. In 2015 President Barack Obama proclaimed the Basin and Range National Monument, which includes the area of City. His work is held in museum collections worldwide, and he has had major exhibitions in Essen, Los Angeles and Milan. He lives and works in Hiko, Nevada, and New York City.