On Solid Ground

gallery neptune & brown is pleased to present a multi-media exhibition of land art, featuring Andy Goldsworthy, Michael Dax Iacovone, Richard Long, and David Nash.

Emerging in the 1960s, the earth art movement (alternatively referred to as land art or environmental art) called on artists to engage directly with the land as material. Through manipulations of fire, water, wind, salt, sand, stone, time, and space, land artists investigated the ephemerality of nature and of art itself.

Land artists often take a formalist approach toward their work, rejecting romantic interpretations and instead focusing on the form and properties of their materials. They emphasize the physical process of creating a piece and are keenly tuned in to what David Nash refers to as the “experience of making”. The concept of time also shines through in each artists’ work, as many of their creations are conceived to expose the piece to nature’s processes as well as the effects of time.

David Nash (British, b. 1945) is widely known for his sculptures made from fallen or dead trees that are minimalist and simple in form. While his primary material is raw, untreated wood, Nash also works in the two-dimensional. As a way to reflect on the development of his sculptures, he creates charcoal drawings and pochoirs of his three-dimensional forms. Nash is one of few artists that reflects on his process through drawing—photography remains the medium chosen most often by land artists to document their work. This exhibition features five recent pochoirs from sculptures that Nash completed contemporaneously.

Andy Goldsworthy (British, b. 1956) creates art that endures cycles of growth and decay. Using his hands as his primary tools, Goldsworthy constructs sculptures of leaves, sticks, ice, stone, and snow. To capture the change his works undergo, the artist intently photographs the life cycle of each creation. As most of his artwork is created in remote locations, the photographs serve as a way for Goldsworthy to talk about his art, providing an intimate view of nature’s amazing abilities.

Richard Long (b. 1945), another British land artist, works primarily with mud and stone. An influencer of the original movement, Long is well-known for the insertion of performance into his work which often includes traversing of long distances and the physical marking of his travels. In the same vein as Goldsworthy, Long photographs his work, and frequently adds text commentary of his walks, denoting a presence of human action against the still landscape.

Michael Dax Iacovone (American, b. 1975) cites Long as one of his inspirations. In the Summer of 2019, Iacovone spent weeks alone in the desert drawing mile-long Euclidian diagrams in the salt and sand of the Bonneville Salt Flats. Inspired by the intersection of classical mathematics and the natural world, along with the atomic bomb testing sites in Nevada and the Nazca Lines in Peru, the work of Iacovone denotes the artist’s interest in the human history of mark-making. Commenting on the impermanence of his drawings, which are naturally washed away in the following months, he states, “It doesn’t matter to me that weeks of labor in the hot desert sun erase, and it doesn’t bother me that I am likely the only one to see them in person…the process of making the lines is the important part to me.”