Agnes Denes

The Conceptual art movement of the late twentieth century often overlapped with large environmental art projects. Individuals such as Christo and Robert Smithson designed and implemented huge site-specific installations that engage rather than depict landscape. Agnes Denes is another pioneer of these important postmodern trends. The artist relies on her knowledge of physics, logic, and mathematics, combining it with sociopolitical and ecological concerns.

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1931, Ágnes Dóra Dénes, was raised in Stockholm, Sweden before immigrating to the United States while still in her teens. [1] She studied at the New School for Social Research from1959 until 1963, with an intervening year at City College of New York from 1961 to 1962. Following graduation, she spent the next two years at Columbia University. She began exhibiting her paintings in 1960 but by 1968 abandoned painting in favor of various drawing and printmaking media including text, graphs, photographs, x-rays, and sculpture/public art projects.

In the early 1970s, Denes was invited to join the important feminist A.I.R.—Artists in Residence— Gallery in New York. This was the decade when women artists collectively broke into the art mainstream, and Denes was part of this historic moment. Founded in 1973, A.I.R. Gallery, along with Womanspace in Los Angeles, provided opportunities for women artists to gather and display their work and these entities served as models for similar venues around the country. While their efforts garnered attention, the intensity and activity level were difficult to maintain. [2] In keeping with Denes’s longstanding involvement with the feminist art movement, she received the “Anonymous was a Woman” award in 2007, a project of the FJC-A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds.

In 1974, Denes was given a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She subsequently exhibited extensively in this country and internationally, notably in the 1978, 1980, and 2001 Venice Biennales. She received much attention for her 1982 ecological project Wheatfield—A Confrontation, at the Battery Park Landfill in Manhattan, where she planted two acres that yielded one thousand pounds of wheat. In Finland, her Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule involved the planting of eleven thousand pine trees in an intricate pattern on top of an old gravel quarry. In addition to her site-specific work, Denes is the author of four books.

Primarily interested in exploring the structure of matter and ideas, Denes transforms scientific and mathematical theoretical concepts into visible, concrete images. She combines photography, printmaking, literature, and the environment with her knowledge of math, science, art history, and philosophy to give visual shape to abstract principles. She is concerned with the social and ecological legacy of contemporary society, and creates ambitious large-scale environmental work to critique it. As one historian states, “Denes remains even today an artist for the cognoscenti, a figure whose art is difficult to convey in the simple terms that seem to be a prerequisite for fame in our society.” [3]

Notes:

[1] Denes’s birth date sometimes appears as 1938.

[2] Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, ed. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1994), 108.

[3] Ricardo D. Barreto, “Sculptural Conceptualism: A New Reading of the Work of Agnes Denes,” Sculpture Magazine, 18, no. 4 (May 1999), 17.