Nancy Holt: Sightlines
28 Jan - 27 Mar 2011
Holt shooting the film Sun Tunnels, 1978.
Photograph by Lee Deffebach
The Papers of Nancy Holt, Galisteo, New Mexico.
Photograph by Lee Deffebach
The Papers of Nancy Holt, Galisteo, New Mexico.
Badischer Kunstverein is pleased to present Nancy Holt: Sightlines, the first comprehensive exhibition of this important American artist in Germany! The exhibition offers an in-depth look at the early projects of Nancy Holt whose pioneering work falls at the intersection of art, architecture and time-based media. Since the late 1960s, Nancy Holt has created a far-reaching body of work, including Land Art, films, videos, site-specific installations, artist’s books, concrete poetry and major sculpture commissions. Nancy Holt: Sightlines showcases the artist’s transformation of the perception of the landscape through the use of different observational modes in her early films, videos and related works from 1966 to 1980.
Nancy Holt: Sightlines encompasses more than 40 works that illuminate Holt’s circumvention of modernist sculptural practice and institutional spaces. With her novel use of cylindrical forms, light and techniques of reflection, Holt developed a unique aesthetics of perception, which enabled visitors to her sites to engage with the landscape in new and challenging ways. Works like Sun Tunnels (1973–76), Views Through a Sand Dune (1972), and her extensive Locator series were responsive to the environment and offered novel means for observing natural phenomena, such as summer and winter solstices, and sun and moonlight patterns, which transform specific geographic locations into vivid and resonant experiences.
Although Holt’s work has regularly appeared in surveys and anthologies on the Land Art movement, many of her forays into film and video, landscape architecture and environmental ecology have gone surprisingly unexamined. Notable works in the exhibition are Swamp (1971, in collaboration with Robert Smithson), Locating #2 (1972), Boomerang (1974, in collaboration with Richard Serra) and Points of View (1974), alongside materials from early moments of Holt’s career that have been selected from the artist’s archive, which has only now become available for exhibition.
Nancy Holt, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1938, she now lives in Galisteo, New Mexico. After graduating from Tufts University she moved to New York, where —alongside a group of colleagues and collaborators including Michael Heizer, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson — she began working in film, video, installation and sound art. Holt’s work has been shown in national and international exhibitions, e.g. at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Tate Modern in London.
Nancy Holt: Sightlines is curated by Alena J. Williams and based on an exhibition originated and circulated by the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University. Major support for the development and presentation of the original project was provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Nancy Holt: Sightlines encompasses more than 40 works that illuminate Holt’s circumvention of modernist sculptural practice and institutional spaces. With her novel use of cylindrical forms, light and techniques of reflection, Holt developed a unique aesthetics of perception, which enabled visitors to her sites to engage with the landscape in new and challenging ways. Works like Sun Tunnels (1973–76), Views Through a Sand Dune (1972), and her extensive Locator series were responsive to the environment and offered novel means for observing natural phenomena, such as summer and winter solstices, and sun and moonlight patterns, which transform specific geographic locations into vivid and resonant experiences.
Although Holt’s work has regularly appeared in surveys and anthologies on the Land Art movement, many of her forays into film and video, landscape architecture and environmental ecology have gone surprisingly unexamined. Notable works in the exhibition are Swamp (1971, in collaboration with Robert Smithson), Locating #2 (1972), Boomerang (1974, in collaboration with Richard Serra) and Points of View (1974), alongside materials from early moments of Holt’s career that have been selected from the artist’s archive, which has only now become available for exhibition.
Nancy Holt, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1938, she now lives in Galisteo, New Mexico. After graduating from Tufts University she moved to New York, where —alongside a group of colleagues and collaborators including Michael Heizer, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson — she began working in film, video, installation and sound art. Holt’s work has been shown in national and international exhibitions, e.g. at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Tate Modern in London.
Nancy Holt: Sightlines is curated by Alena J. Williams and based on an exhibition originated and circulated by the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University. Major support for the development and presentation of the original project was provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.