Double Negative by Michael Heizer is a monumental cut in the earth. The sculpture was created in 1969 and remains one of the most important works of the Land Art movement to this day. Funded by progressive gallerist and patron Virginia Dwan, Heizer and his team displaced 240,000 tons of desert sandstone with explosives and bulldozers to create two long, straight trenches cut into the Mormon Mesa. Double negative measures 30 feet wide, 50 feet deep and more than a quarter mile across.

The cuts infer a positive form between them — as if designed to cradle an unseen object laid down in the Nevada Desert. Descending down into the artwork, the artist’s sense of scale is felt with immediacy. Double negative is a staggeringly large sculpture surrounded for miles with nothing but barren desert.

When creating the work, Heizer talked about making sculptures that evoke a sense of awe and pseudo religious experience. “Immense, architecturally sized sculpture creates both the object and the atmosphere… I think if people feel commitment they feel something has been transcended. To create a transcendent work of art means to go past everything."

Heizer was a pioneering figure in the Land Art movement of the late 1960s and 1970s; a group of artists who rejected the modern gallery system and instead embraced the natural landscape as their medium. Alongside contemporaries like Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson, and Nancy Holt, Heizer reframed and challenged conventional ideas about art by creating work that defied commercialization — works not able to be housed in a gallery, easily sold or collected.