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Haus der Kunst presents Ends of the Earth. Land art from the 1960s to 1974

Haus der Kunst in Munich presents Ends of the Earth. Land art from the 1960s to 1974, an exhibition on view 11.10.12 – 20.01.13.

As the first major museum exhibition on Land Art, “Ends of the Earth” provides the most comprehensive historical overview of this art movement to date. Land Art used the earth as its material and the land as its medium, thereby creating works beyond the familiar spatial framework of the art system.

The exhibition presents nearly 200 works by more than 100 artists from all over the world. Even before the emergence of the movement in the 1960s, artists from the most varied locations around the globe were increasingly moved to use land as an artistic medium. In a basic sense, this also included the examination of the nature of the earth as a planet. Yves Klein, for instance, wondered what the earth looked like from space. In 1961, he transformed his vision that the dominant color from this perspective would be blue, and that all man-made boundaries could be overcome with this color, into his series “Planetary Reliefs.”

he artists often worked under the open sky, making productive use of the fact that the great outdoors posed other conditions for a work’s lifespan than enclosed spaces did. Some works only existed for the short time of their creation, like Judy Chicago’s ephemeral works consisting of colored flames and smoke. For ten weeks, the cliffs along Little Bay, Sydney, were packed in synthetic fabric and rope for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet”, which, like many other works of Land Art, was enormous in scale. Another famous work of similar proportions was “Spiral Jetty” by Robert Smithson; on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, USA, the artist built a 1,500-foot long spiral-shaped jetty made of material found on site.

The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA). – www.hausderkunst.de