Michael Heizer’s new exhibition, titled “Negative Sculpture,” which occupies Gagosian’s entire West 21st Street space in NYC, experiments with the possibilities of ‘negative space’ or the unused space around a subject.

Negative Space Sculpture

Since he joined Gagosian in 2013, Heizer and his team have been thinking “maybe we could put a negative sculpture in the ground,” Kara Vander Weg, a Gagosian managing director, said. “At first it seemed unworkable because we didn’t want to cut into the ground. That involves going to the buildings department. It’s very complicated slicing a floor.”

Over the last two years, the artist created various “investigations to make sure that we could, in fact, build up the ground to accommodate the sculptures, and of course make it safe for visitors to walk around,” Vander Weg, who is also married to Heizer, stated.

Heizer decided to raise the floor of the gallery, meaning that the two sculptures, titled Convoluted Line A and Convoluted Line B, could be assembled at his studio in Nevada. The sculptures were then broken down into sections, loaded onto flatbed trucks, and transported to New York.

The show features steel liners filled with crushed red granite, curving through the gallery floor to create a ribbon-like effect. The crushed granite that was used to fill the negative sculptures had to be dried and cleaned to eliminate impurities so it would appear uniform.

It was reportedly important to Heizer that the color of the concrete was identical to the color of the ground where they were produced.

“When I saw it, I understood why the color was so important,” Vander Weg said. “I think it really highlights the sculpture in a different way than if it had just been gray concrete. It makes the sculpture feel ethereal.”

“Michael Heizer: Negative Sculpture” runs through Saturday, March 28, at Gagosian Gallery.