Agnes Denes (Dénes Ágnes; born 1931 in Budapest) is a Hungarian-born American conceptual artist based in New York. She is known for works in a wide range of media—from poetry and philosophical writings to extremely detailed drawings, sculptures, and iconic land art works, such as Wheatfield — A Confrontation (1982), a two-acre field of wheat in downtown Manhattan, commissioned by the Public Art Fund, and Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule (1992–96) in, Finland. Her work Rice/Tree/Burial with Time Capsule (1968–79) is recognized as one of the earliest examples of ecological art. She lives and works in New York City.

Early life and career

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1931, her family survived World War II, the Nazi occupation, and moved to Sweden on their way to the United States. As a teenager, she created her first environmental/philosophical work, Bird Project, in Sweden, comparing migrating bird colonies to people — the migrants of the world. She studied painting at the New School and Columbia University in New York. She began her artistic career as a poet. Her poetic practice eventually became works of a unique intellectual content and form she later called Visual Philosophy. She has said that the repeated changes in language led her to focus on the visual arts. She soon abandoned painting, due to the constraints of the canvas, and focused broadly on ideas she could explore in other mediums, saying, "I found its vocabulary limiting." In the early 1970s, she joined the A.I.R. Gallery as a founding member. She has since participated in more than 600 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world, and has written six books. She has one son, Robert T. Frankel and twin grandchildren, Ian and Alessa Frankel. Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

Selected works

Ecological

As a pioneer of Land Art, Agnes Denes created Rice/Tree/Burial in 1968 in Sullivan County, New York. Acknowledged as the first site-specific performance piece with ecological concerns, it was enacted ten years later on an expanded scale at Artpark in Lewiston, New York. This performance piece involved planting rice seeds in a field in upstate New York, chaining surrounding trees and burying a time capsule filled with copies of her haiku. "It was about communication with the earth," Denes said, "and communicating with the future.""

Agnes Denes at Artpark, 1977-1979

During her time at Artpark, Denes recreated her Rice/Tree/Burial piece from 1968. In 1977, she planted a half acre (0.2 ha) of rice 150 feet (45 m) above the spot where Niagara Falls had originally formed. The land itself that she worked on was known to have been an industrial dumping ground, which affected the quality of the rice. In 1978, she continued the project by chaining together trees in the forest in the park to symbolize interference with growth. On August 20, 1979, Denes buried a time capsule at 47° 10′ longitude, 79° 2′ 32″ latitude set to be opened in the twenty-third century. The capsule includes microfilmed responses of university students to questions about the nature of humanity. Along with the rice, time capsule, and ceremonial chaining of trees in the park, Denes shot photographs of Niagara Falls for this iteration of Rice/Tree/Burial to "add natural force as the fourth element and fuse the other three". After months of preparations, in May 1982, a two-acre (0.8 ha) wheat field was planted on a landfill in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty, sponsored by the Public Art Fund. To create the work, titled Wheatfield — A Confrontation, 200 truckloads of dirt were brought in and 285 furrows were dug by hand and cleared of rocks and garbage. The seeds were sown by hand and the furrows covered with soil. The field was maintained for four months, cleared of wheat smut, weeded, fertilized, and sprayed against mildew fungus, and an irrigation system was set up. The crop was harvested on August 16 and yielded over 1,000 pounds (455 kg) of healthy, golden wheat. A monumental earthwork reclamation project and the first human-made virgin forest, situated in Ylöjärvi, Western Finland. The site was dedicated by the President of Finland upon its completion in 1996 and is legally protected for the next four hundred years. 6000 trees of an endangered species with varying heights at maturity were planted into five spirals by the artist, creating a step pyramid for each spiral when the trees are fullgrown. The trees help alleviate serious land erosion and desertification threatening Australia. A 25-year master plan to unite a 100 kilometer-long string of forts dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Incorporating water and flood management, urban planning, historical preservation, landscaping, and tourism into a single plan. A conceptual master plan was developed for the conversion of a 97-acre municipal landfill, surrounded by water on three sides in the San Francisco Bay, into an oasis for people and nature. One in a series of large earth sculptures, The Living Pyramid, was the first land art work by the artist in New York City in over 3 decades. Commission by the Socrates Sculpture Park, it was on view from May through October 2015, and recreated in 2017 for documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. An Agnes Denes work titled Living Pyramid is continuing its presence on the grounds of Istanbul's Sakıp Sabancı private museum on Sabancı University. The pyramid has different plants from the Istanbul flora placed on its sides depending on the need for shade or sun.

Visual philosophy

Beginning in 1968, she began an intensive exploration of philosophy through art. The result was, according to Jill Hartz of Cornell University, "an amazing body of work, distinguished by its intellectual rigor, aesthetic beauty, conceptual analysis, and environmental concern."

Sculpture

Writing

See three titles under Visual Philosophy, above.

Catalogues

Public collections

Denes has more than ten works in the Museum of Modern Art's collection. In the Metropolitan Museum, the artist has five pieces in the permanent collection. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Denes has three pieces in the permanent collection. Beyond that, the artist has work in forty-three additional museum permanent collections.

Critical response

"What ties it all together is Ms. Denes's insistence on marrying ambitious intellectual ideas with exquisite formal execution. In contrast to many of her conceptual and land-art peers, she has always been deeply involved with drawing." "In the history of art there have been a few artists' artists—individuals who have emphasized in their work the raising of provocative questions and who have also tested the limits of art by taking it into new, unforeseen areas and by using it for distinctly new functions. Agnes Denes is one of these special artists." "A gallery exhibition can only suggest how far and wide the polymathic Ms. Denes has ranged over material and mental worlds during the past four decades. It would take a full-scale museum retrospective to do that."

Selected solo exhibitions

"Agnes Denes, Sculptures of the Mind: 1968 to Now," Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, New York Travel: Herron Gallery, Herron School of Art, Indiana University, Indianapolis; Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milkwaukee, Wisc.; Naples Museum of Art, Naples, Florida. "The Pyramid Suite and Project Drawings", View Gallery, New York "Agnes Denes - El Concepto Hecho Forma, Obras, 1970-1990", Anselmo Alvarez Galeria de Arte, Madrid, Spain (catalog) Northern Illinois University Art Gallery, Chicago, Ill. "Anima/Persona - The Seed", Elise Meyer, Inc., New York "Agnes Denes", Galleriet, Lund, Sweden Galerie Aronowitsch, Stockholm, Sweden Studio d'Arte Cannaviello, Milan, Italy "Agnes Denes: Work 1968-78", Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (catalog) "Sculptures of the Mind," Centre Culturel Americain, Paris, France "Animi Pathema - The Emotional Animal", 112 Greene Street Gallery, New York "Agnes Denes", Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, Calif. "Sculptures of the Mind", University of Akron, Ohio (catalog) Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

Awards