NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian announced the publication of Walter De Maria: The Object, the Action, the Aesthetic Feeling. At almost five hundred pages, it is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s entire, exceptionally diverse oeuvre. Exploring both his creative career and his personal life, The Object, the Action, the Aesthetic Feeling reveals the interconnected and influential nature of Walter De Maria’s practice. The book will be available for purchase in Gagosian’s physical and online shops beginning October 28, at a price of $200, and will be distributed by Rizzoli International Publications early next year.

Kara Vander Weg, senior director at Gagosian, who has worked with De Maria for a decade, noted, “Drawing on rarely seen archival material from the artist’s studio and the knowledge of numerous experts in the field, including Walter’s longtime studio head, to make this book has been a remarkable experience. Walter’s genius and the complexity of his sculpture—in both concept and form—has never been more apparent, and there is a profound timelessness to the work. He is as relevant to artists, scholars, and curators today as he was decades ago, as witnessed by the major exhibition at the Menil Collection, Houston, opening this month.”

While best known for interactive public sculptures and monumental works of Land art, De Maria also produced paintings, drawings, and films, as well as musical compositions and writing. The Object, the Action, the Aesthetic Feeling documents more than two hundred such projects made or envisioned by the artist between 1960 and his death in 2013, as well as some realized posthumously. Presented in roughly chronological order, these are catalogued and illustrated with new and recent photography; many are also supplemented by archival and documentary images.

In a heartfelt foreword, Larry Gagosian touches on his long friendship with and professional commitment to De Maria, an artist whose vision was never explicitly oriented toward market success. “It is rare in this business to have the opportunity to work with an artist whose vision is so singular that they practically invent a new medium,” he writes. “I am proud to be able to publish this beautiful, surprising, significant document of Walter’s life and to participate in the preservation of the work and legacy of his brilliant mind.” Curator Donna De Salvo provides an introduction, while catalogue entries written by Elizabeth Childress, director of the Walter De Maria Archive, and Michael Childress, the Archive’s archivist, include short contextual commentaries, as well as statements by the artist, which elucidate both his evolving ambition and the formal and philosophical concerns that unify his work.

Three other essayists—all internationally recognized art historians—explore the progression and range of De Maria’s work: In “Other Work: The De Maria Experience, 1960–77,” Christine Mehring writes about the artist’s early works in a text accompanied by images of never-before-seen or rarely seen drawings and early installations; in “The Invisible Is Real,” Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, surveys the artist’s mid-career output; and Lars Nittve, who organized a 1989 De Maria retrospective, comments on the artist’s late works in “Walter De Maria: Stealth Sublime.”




The book contains the first detailed chronology of De Maria’s life and work. Drawn from the artist’s archive, it illustrates lesser-known aspects of his personality and activity, including his time as a drummer in a band that was a precursor to the Velvet Underground. Seen alongside a selection of ephemera, such insights humanize a private and somewhat enigmatic individual. The section was researched and written by Dagny Corcoran, a longtime friend of De Maria’s.

Also included is an extensively illustrated catalogue of works, covering an almost sixty-year period from 1960 through 2017 (when some works were realized posthumously), while a concluding documentation section reproduces selected exhibition histories and bibliographies.

The publication of The Object, the Action, the Aesthetic Feeling coincides with Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work, a major exhibition at the Menil Collection, Houston, which opens on October 29, 2022, and will be on view through April 23, 2023. Most of the works featured are included in the book’s catalogue of works.

Gagosian’s extensive in-house publishing program has produced over six hundred books, including catalogues raisonnés, artist monographs, scholarly exhibition catalogues, and limited-edition artist’s books. The gallery started publishing in 1986 and today its output rivals that of traditional arts trade publishers, averaging between twenty-five and forty titles a year. Recent subjects include Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chris Burden, Helen Frankenthaler, Katharina Grosse, Damien Hirst, Donald Judd, Nam June Paik, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, Mary Weatherford, and Rachel Whiteread. The gallery also produces Gagosian Quarterly, a celebrated print and online magazine.

Walter De Maria was born in 1935 in Albany, California, and died in 2013 in Los Angeles. Collections include Dia Art Foundation, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Menil Collection, Houston; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Recent exhibitions include Silver Meters, Gold Meters, Dia Beacon, NY (2010); Large Red Sphere, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2010); Trilogies, Menil Collection, Houston (2011); The 2000 Sculpture, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012–13); Equal Area Series, Dia Beacon, NY (2013); Counterpoint, Dallas Museum of Art (2016); 360º I Ching / 64 Sculptures, Dia Beacon, NY (2016); and Surface Waves, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017).

De Maria’s permanent installations around the world include The New York Earth Room (1977), New York; The Lightning Field (1977), Quemado, NM; The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), Kassel, Germany; The Broken Kilometer (1979), New York; Monument to the Bicentennial of the French Revolution 1789–1989 (1989–90), Assemblée Nationale, Paris; Time/Timeless/No Time (2004), Chichu Art Museum, Naoshima, Japan; and Large Red Sphere (2010), Türkentor, Kunstareal München, Munich. His sculpture Apollo’s Ecstasy (1990) was included in the Biennale di Venezia in 2013.