The Art of Agnes Denes May Be as Big (and Long-Lasting) as Her Legacy

For five decades, conceptual artist Agnes Denes has brought scientifically driven works to the world. Inspired by philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, and other fields, Denes produces intricately annotated drawings, geometrically precise sculptures, and large-scale public art commissions—the most famous of which was a field of wheat planted in downtown Manhattan.

The Hungarian-American artist has had a lifelong appreciation of the physical universe around her and a deep respect for our ailing planet. This led Denes to make art about humanity’s destruction of the natural world before most other people were even paying attention. A self-taught polymath, she has studied cloud formations, investigated comets, observed overcrowded bird habitats, and even engineered a method to remove methane from the atmosphere with algae (unfortunately, not at the scale we need).

A retrospective of 130 works of the now 89-year-old, Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates, is on exhibit until March 22 at the Shed in New York City. Environmentalism “is a key to her art,” says senior curator Emma Enderby, who organized the encyclopedic one-woman show. “Agnes says [to us], ‘We live in nature; we are nature. We have to get our relationship to it where it should be.’”

Already known in the art world for her scientific illustration–like Philosophical Drawings, Denes burst onto the world stage in 1982 with Wheatfield—a Confrontation, a two-acre field of wheat growing on undeveloped land at Manhattan’s southern tip. Just blocks from Wall Street, the epicenter of global capitalism, and within sight of the Statue of Liberty, towering stalks of golden grain swayed in the wind that summer against a backdrop of skyscrapers and city streets.

By creating an impossible paradox on the urban landscape, Wheatfield raised questions about land use, mismanagement of natural resources, and ecological concerns. When the growing season ended, Denes and her team harvested the field with a tractor, distributing wheat seeds to the public during a 28-city international tour—the artist’s symbolic answer to the crisis of global hunger and food inequalities—and donating the hay to the New York City’s mounted police for its horses.

Another of Denes’s monumental earthworks, Tree Mountain—a Living Time Capsule—11,000 Trees—11,000 People—400 Years is located about a two-hour drive north of Helsinki, Finland. Elliptical in shape, Tree Mountain is an artificial mound that rises from a former gravel pit, sloping gently to a summit of nearly 100 feet.

Commissioned by the Finnish government and announced on World Environment Day in 1992, Tree Mountain continues to provide habitat for animals and a natural filter for groundwater. Planted by 11,000 people from all over the world, the trees grow in a mathematically derived swirling pattern. Denes also chose a variety of pine for the project that can live up to 400 years. Her hope is that the forest will act as a witness to future generations, telling them we were a society that cared for the environment. After the project’s completion in 1996, Denes wrote that Tree Mountain “is designed to unite the human intellect with the majesty of nature.”

At the Shed, Denes’s ongoing “Pyramid Series” occupies an entire floor. The works, which she began constructing in 1970, embody the artist’s near obsession with the four-sided, triangular pyramid. In her hands, the classic form is multiplied, stacked, and sorted into a multitude of three-dimensional formats. Some pieces take on familiar shapes from the plant and animal worlds—for example, Fish Pyramid and Egg.

Denes provocatively presents other pieces in the series as architectural models for cities that can be built underwater or in outer space for refugees from the climate crisis. In Model for Teardrop—Monument to Being Earthbound, she uses magnets and 3D printing to construct a teardrop-shaped object that hovers above a round base, to represent a space colony orbiting the Earth.

As a proposal for a community located safely outside of the planet’s poisoned atmosphere, it would require huge advances in magnets and superconductors to become a reality. But as an example of Denes’s far-reaching vision and imagination, it’s the reason Enderby calls so many of her projects not unfinished works, but “future works.”

Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates is on view at the Shed in New York City until March 22, 2020.

This article was originally published on onEarth, which is no longer in publication. onEarth was founded in 1979 as the Amicus Journal, an independent magazine of thought and opinion on the environment. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. This article is available for online republication by news media outlets or nonprofits under these conditions: The writer(s) must be credited with a byline; you must note prominently that the article was originally published by NRDC.org and link to the original; the article cannot be edited (beyond simple things such grammar); you can’t resell the article in any form or grant republishing rights to other outlets; you can’t republish our material wholesale or automatically—you need to select articles individually; you can’t republish the photos or graphics on our site without specific permission; you should drop us a note to let us know when you’ve used one of our articles.