Land Art - When Nature Becomes the Canvas

In the late 1960s, land art emerged as one of many artistic trends seeking new materials, disciplines, and locations for creating and exhibiting artwork. Land art artists explore the potential of the landscape and environment, both in terms of materials and location. Rather than reproducing nature, artists use it directly in their works.

The first artists representing this art were Americans: Walter De Maria (b. 1935), Nancy Holt (b. 1938), Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), Richard Serra (b. 1939), Robert Smithson (1938-1973) and James Turrell (b. 1943). They were followed by British, Dutch and Israeli artists.
Land art includes monumental sculptures made by nature itself. In 1970, Smithson transformed an industrial wasteland into the space for one of the most famous works of land art, Spiral Dig. The work consists of a spiral-shaped road built of black basalt stones and earth, which reaches the waters of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. What Smithson did not know at the time is that the water level was very low, and shortly after the work was completed, it was flooded. In 2002, after years of drought, the Spiral Dam made a spectacular reappearance. In the meantime, the stones had become covered in a crust of white salt crystals. Smithson was fascinated by the physical concept of entropy (reverse evolution) – nature not only self-generates, but also self-destructs. Smithson appropriated nature for artistic purposes, but nature in turn appropriated its own work of art through the salt crust and erosion.

Land art also includes giant sculptures in the landscape, such as Holt's astronomical constructions called the Sun Tunnels in Utah's Great Basin Desert, aligned with the position of the sun on the horizon at sunrise and sunset during the solstices.

Serra’s monumental work in the Ruhr Basin, Germany, was erected to commemorate the declining coal and steel industries. The work – Plaque for the Ruhr – consists of a monumental-sized steel plate set in the middle of a leveled, slag mound, kept bare of vegetation as an authentic reminder of the basin’s industrial past.

The works of land artists can be photographs, diagrams and texts, or they can be recordings of expeditions and temporary interventions in the landscape, or they capture and frame natural phenomena and the passage of time.