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[[File:Tree Mountain sketch.jpg|thumb|Tree Mountain located in Ylöjärvi, Finland]]
[[File:Tree Mountain sketch.jpg|thumb|Tree Mountain located in Ylöjärvi, Finland]]


'''Anges Denes''' is a [[New York City]] based [[Conceptual art|conceptual artist]] known for works in a wide range of mediums - from poetry and philosophy writings, to complex hand and computer rendered diagrams (which she terms Visual Philosophy), and international [[Environmental art|environmental installations]], such as ''Wheatfield -- A Confrontation'' (1982), a two-acre wheatfield in downtown Manhattan.<ref name=NYT2012>{{cite web|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/arts/design/agnes-denes-stretches-the-canvas-as-far-as-can-go.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0|title=New York Times, Nov 28, 2012 - Stretching Her Creativity as Far as Possible by Carol Kino}}</ref>
'''Agnes Denes''' is internationally known for works investigating science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, poetry, history, and music, created in a wide range of mediums. Her conceptually-based artistic practice is distinctive in terms of its engagement with aesthetics and socio-political ideas. Born in Hungary in 1931, raised in Sweden, and educated in the United States, her artistic career began in the 1960s. She has since participated in more than 450 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world including, among others, solo shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1974); the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1979); and retrospective surveys at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (1992); the Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (2003); and the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2008). Her work has also been featured in such international surveys as the Biennale of Sydney (1976); documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977); the Venice Biennale (1978); and more recently ''Systems, Actions & Processes: 1965–1975,'' PROA Foundation, Buenos Aires (2011); ''Erre: variations labyrinthiques,'' Centre Pompidou, Metz (2011–12); ''Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph: 1964–1977,'' Art Institute of Chicago (2012); Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012); and ''Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art,'' Brooklyn Museum (2012).


==Biography and Early Career==
Works by the artist are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Kunsthalle Nürnberg; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; among others. 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. ''Wheatfield – A Confrontation'' is arguably Agnes Denes’s best known work. It was created during a six-month period in the spring, summer, and fall of 1982 when Denes, with the support of the Public Art Fund, planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center). Among her many other artistic achievements is ''Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule,'' a monumental earthwork reclamation project and the first man-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.
Born in [[Budapest, Hungary]] in 1931, her family survived the Nazi occupation and moved to Sweden in the mid 1940s. As a teenager, they relocated again to the [[United States]]. She has said that the repeated change in language caused her to focus on the visual arts. At some point in the late 1960s-1970s, she was married and had one son. Beginning in the 1960s, her first artistic endeavors were painting, which she found limiting due to the constraints of the canvas.<ref name=NYT2012/>


Abandoning painting, she focused broadly on ideas she could explore in other mediums.
Agnes Denes is equally known for her innovative use of metallic inks and other nontraditional materials in creating a prodigious body of drawings and prints that delineate her explorations in a variety of disciplines. She has completed public and private commissions in North and South America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, and has received numerous honors and awards including four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; four grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; the DAAD Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (1978); the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award (1985); the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT (1990); the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1998); the Jill Watson Award for Transdisciplinary Achievement in the Arts from Carnegie Mellon University (1999); the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007); and the Ambassador’s Award for Cultural Diplomacy (2008) from the American Embassy in Hungary. Denes holds honorary doctorates from Ripon College and Bucknell University and has had fellowships at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. She lectures extensively at colleges and universities throughout the United States and abroad, and participates in global conferences on art and the environment. She is the author of six books and is featured in numerous other publications on a wide range of subjects. She is represented by [http://www.tonkonow.com/denes.html Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York].
She has since participated in more than 450 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world.


==Selected works==
==Selected works==
''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.'' - Carol Kino, New York Times.<ref name=NYT2012/>

===Ecological===
* ''Rice/Tree/Burial'' 1968, Eco-Logic, [[Sullivan County, New York]]; re-created 1977 at [[Artpark]] <ref>{{cite journal |last=Boettger |first=Suzaan |title=Excavating Land Art by Women in the 1970s |journal=Sculpture |year=2008 |issue=November |pages=38–45 |volume=27 |number=9 }}</ref>
* ''Rice/Tree/Burial'' 1968, Eco-Logic, [[Sullivan County, New York]]; re-created 1977 at [[Artpark]] <ref>{{cite journal |last=Boettger |first=Suzaan |title=Excavating Land Art by Women in the 1970s |journal=Sculpture |year=2008 |issue=November |pages=38–45 |volume=27 |number=9 }}</ref>
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<ref name=NYT2012/>, 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,” Ms. Denes said, “and communicating with the future.”"<ref name=NYT2012/>
⚫
* ''Wheatfield, a Confrontation'' 1982 [[Manhattan]], [[Battery Park]] City [[landfill]] <ref>{{cite web |title=Greenmuseum.org - Agnes Denes |url=http://www.greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-63.html |accessdate=2008-10-23}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Glueck |first=Grace | title=A Critic's Guide to the Outdoor Sculpture Shows |journal=New York Times |issue=June 11 |url=http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902E6DE163BF932A25755C0A964948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=3 |accessdate=2008-10-24 | work=The New York Times | date=1982-06-11}}</ref>
Arguably Agnes Denes’s best known work. It was created during a six-month period in the spring, summer, and fall of 1982 when Denes, with the support of the Public Art Fund, planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center).
⚫
* ''Tree Mountain-a living time capsule'' 1996, [[Ylöjärvi]], [[Finland]]<ref>{{cite web |title=Agnes Denes |url=http://www.asci.org/artikel921.html |accessdate=2008-10-23| archiveurl= http://web.archive.org/web/20081123070609/http://www.asci.org/artikel921.html| archivedate= 23 November 2008 <!--DASHBot-->| deadurl= no}}</ref>
A monumental earthwork reclamation project and the first man-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.
⚫
* ''A Forest for Australia'' [[reforestation]] of [[Eucalyptus camaldulensis|Red Gum]], [[Allocasuarina verticallata|She Oak]], and [[Melaleuca halmaturorum|Paperbark]] trees in [[Melbourne]] [[Australia]] 1998 <ref>[http://www.marquette.edu/haggerty/press/denespress.html Agnes Denes: Projects for Public Spaces]</ref><ref>{{cite web |last=Denes |first=Agnes |title=My work as an environmental artist |url=http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/iiaa/io1998/denes2.html |accessdate=2008-10-26}}</ref>
⚫
* [[Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie]] masterplan, 2000


===Visual Philosophy===
⚫
* ''Wheatfield, a Confrontation'' 1982 [[Manhattan]], [[Battery Park]] City [[landfill]] <ref>{{cite web |title=Wheatfield |url=http://www.greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-63.html |accessdate=2008-10-23}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Glueck |first=Grace | title=A Critic's Guide to the Outdoor Sculpture Shows |journal=New York Times |issue=June 11 |url=http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902E6DE163BF932A25755C0A964948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=3 |accessdate=2008-10-24 | work=The New York Times | date=1982-06-11}}</ref>
<gallery>
File:Isometric_Systems_in_Isotropic_Space,_The_Pyramid_by_Agnes_Denes.jpg
File:Study_for_Thought_Complex,_by_Agnes_Denes,_1970.jpg
File:The Human Argument, by Agnes Denes 1974.jpg
File:Agnes_Denes,_From_the_series_Great_Ideas,_Alfred_North_Whitehead.jpg
File:Anges_Denes_-_Study_of_Distortions,_1972.jpg
</gallery>
''Agnes Denes drawings in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution Museum of American Art''


*''Perspectives'', Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1972 [http://books.google.com/books?id=7HFZHAAACAAJ]
⚫
* ''Tree Mountain-a living time capsule'' 1996, [[Ylöjärvi]], [[Finland]]<ref>{{cite web |title=Agnes Denes |url=http://www.asci.org/artikel921.html |accessdate=2008-10-23| archiveurl= http://web.archive.org/web/20081123070609/http://www.asci.org/artikel921.html| archivedate= 23 November 2008 <!--DASHBot-->| deadurl= no}}</ref>
* Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space: Map Projections from the Study of Distortions Series, 1973-1979, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1979 [http://books.google.com/books?id=dd0XAQAAMAAJ]
<gallery>
File:Isometric_Systems_in_Isotropic_Space-Map_Projections,_The_Doughnut_(tangent_torus)_By_Agnes_Denes,_1980.jpg
File:Isometric_Systems_in_Isotropic_Space-Map_Projections,_The_Pyramid,_By_Agnes_Denes,_1980.jpg
File:Study of Distortions; Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space-Map Projections, The Cube, By Agnes Denes, 1978.jpg
</gallery>
''Original drawings for Isometric Systems, from the Museum of Modern Art Collection''
*''Agnes Denes'' by Jill Hartz, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1992 [http://books.google.com/books?id=8K5PAAAAMAAJ]
*''The Visionary Art of Agnes Denes'': An Exhibition of 85 Works, 1996 Gibson Gallery [http://books.google.com/books?id=PchFtwAACAAJ]


*Sculptures of the Mind [http://books.google.com/books?id=YuAFSQAACAAJ]
⚫
* ''A Forest for Australia'' [[reforestation]] of [[Eucalyptus camaldulensis|Red Gum]], [[Allocasuarina verticallata|She Oak]], and [[Melaleuca halmaturorum|Paperbark]] trees in [[Melbourne]] [[Australia]] 1998 <ref>[http://www.marquette.edu/haggerty/press/denespress.html Agnes Denes: Projects for Public Spaces]</ref><ref>{{cite web |last=Denes |first=Agnes |title=My work as an environmental artist |url=http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/iiaa/io1998/denes2.html |accessdate=2008-10-26}}</ref>


===Writing===
⚫
* [[Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie]] masterplan, 2000

==Publications==
* ''The Human Argument'' Spring Publications, Putnam, Connecticut, 2008. ISBN 978-0-88214-569-3
* ''The Human Argument'' Spring Publications, Putnam, Connecticut, 2008. ISBN 978-0-88214-569-3
* ''Project for Public Spaces, a Retrospective'', Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell; 2003 ISBN 0916279219
* ''Poetry Walk—Reflections: Pools of Thought'', 2000 [http://books.google.com/books/about/Poetry_Walk.html?id=_FInAwEACAAJ]
* ''Book of Dust: The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter'' 1989; [http://books.google.com/books?isbn=0898220459]


==Awards and honors==
==Exhibitions and Collections==
*The Visionary Art of Agnes Denes: An Exhibition of 85 Works : February 29, March 28, 1996, State University of New York College at Potsdam, Roland Gibson Gallery
⚫
* 1997 [[Rome Prize]] from the [[American Academy in Rome]] <ref>{{cite journal |title=Winners of the Rome Prize for Work and Study Abroad |journal=New York Times |issue=April 19 |url=http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02E2DE1E3FF93AA25757C0A961958260&scp=11&sq=%22Agnes%20Denes%22&st=cse |accessdate=2008-10-24 | work=The New York Times | date=1997-04-19}}</ref>
*Museum of Modern Art, has 14 pieces in the permanent collection.<ref name=MoMa>{{cite web|url=http://www.moma.org/search/collection?query=agnes+denes|title=Museum of Modern Art Online Collection}}</ref>
⚫
* Watson Transdisciplinary Art Award, [[Carnegie Mellon University]] 1999
*The Metropolitan Museum has 5 pieces in the permanent collection.<ref name=Met>{{cite web|url=http://www.metmuseum.org/search-results?ft=%22Agnes+Denes%22|title=Metropolitan Museum Online Collection}}</ref>
*The Whitney Museum of American Art has 3 pieces in the permanent collection.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://whitney.org/Search?query=%22agnes+Denes%22|title=Whitney Museum Online Collection}}</ref>
She is represented by [http://www.tonkonow.com/denes.html Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York].


==Biographies==
==Awards==
Four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts;
* Agnes Denes [http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com]
Four grants from the New York State Council on the Arts;
* Biography [http://www.asci.org/artikel922.html]
The DAAD Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (1978);
* Greenmuseum Bio [http://greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-63.html]
American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award (1985);
Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT (1990);
⚫
Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1998);<ref>{{cite journal |title=Winners of the Rome Prize for Work and Study Abroad |journal=New York Times |issue=April 19 |url=http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02E2DE1E3FF93AA25757C0A961958260&scp=11&sq=%22Agnes%20Denes%22&st=cse |accessdate=2008-10-24 | work=The New York Times | date=1997-04-19}}</ref>
⚫
Jill Watson Award for Transdisciplinary Achievement in the Arts from Carnegie Mellon University (1999);
Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007);
Ambassador’s Award for Cultural Diplomacy (2008) from the American Embassy in Hungary.


==References==
==References==
{{Reflist}}
{{Reflist}}

==See also==
* [[Restoration ecology]]


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[[de:Agnes Denes]]
[[de:Agnes Denes]]

Revision as of 22:17, 28 December 2012

Agnes Denes
Born1931
Budapest
Known forLand Art
Notable workWheatfield, Tree Mountain
MovementConceptual Art
File:Tree Mountain sketch.jpg
Tree Mountain located in Ylöjärvi, Finland

Anges Denes is a New York City based conceptual artist known for works in a wide range of mediums - from poetry and philosophy writings, to complex hand and computer rendered diagrams (which she terms Visual Philosophy), and international environmental installations, such as Wheatfield -- A Confrontation (1982), a two-acre wheatfield in downtown Manhattan.[1]

Biography and Early Career

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1931, her family survived the Nazi occupation and moved to Sweden in the mid 1940s. As a teenager, they relocated again to the United States. She has said that the repeated change in language caused her to focus on the visual arts. At some point in the late 1960s-1970s, she was married and had one son. Beginning in the 1960s, her first artistic endeavors were painting, which she found limiting due to the constraints of the canvas.[1]

Abandoning painting, she focused broadly on ideas she could explore in other mediums. She has since participated in more than 450 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world.

Selected works

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. - Carol Kino, New York Times.[1]

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[1], 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,” Ms. Denes said, “and communicating with the future.”"[1]

Arguably Agnes Denes’s best known work. It was created during a six-month period in the spring, summer, and fall of 1982 when Denes, with the support of the Public Art Fund, planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center).

A monumental earthwork reclamation project and the first man-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.

Visual Philosophy

Agnes Denes drawings in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution Museum of American Art

  • Perspectives, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1972 [1]
  • Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space: Map Projections from the Study of Distortions Series, 1973-1979, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1979 [2]

Original drawings for Isometric Systems, from the Museum of Modern Art Collection

  • Agnes Denes by Jill Hartz, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1992 [3]
  • The Visionary Art of Agnes Denes: An Exhibition of 85 Works, 1996 Gibson Gallery [4]
  • Sculptures of the Mind [5]

Writing

  • The Human Argument Spring Publications, Putnam, Connecticut, 2008. ISBN 978-0-88214-569-3
  • Project for Public Spaces, a Retrospective, Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell; 2003 ISBN 0916279219
  • Poetry Walk—Reflections: Pools of Thought, 2000 [6]
  • Book of Dust: The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter 1989; [7]

Exhibitions and Collections

  • The Visionary Art of Agnes Denes: An Exhibition of 85 Works : February 29, March 28, 1996, State University of New York College at Potsdam, Roland Gibson Gallery
  • Museum of Modern Art, has 14 pieces in the permanent collection.[8]
  • The Metropolitan Museum has 5 pieces in the permanent collection.[9]
  • The Whitney Museum of American Art has 3 pieces in the permanent collection.[10]

She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Awards

Four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; Four grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; The DAAD Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (1978); American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award (1985); Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT (1990); Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1998);[11] Jill Watson Award for Transdisciplinary Achievement in the Arts from Carnegie Mellon University (1999); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007); Ambassador’s Award for Cultural Diplomacy (2008) from the American Embassy in Hungary.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e "New York Times, Nov 28, 2012 - Stretching Her Creativity as Far as Possible by Carol Kino".
  2. ^ Boettger, Suzaan (2008). "Excavating Land Art by Women in the 1970s". Sculpture. 27 (November): 38–45. {{cite journal}}: More than one of |number= and |issue= specified (help)
  3. ^ "Greenmuseum.org - Agnes Denes". Retrieved 2008-10-23.
  4. ^ Glueck, Grace (1982-06-11). "A Critic's Guide to the Outdoor Sculpture Shows". New York Times (June 11). Retrieved 2008-10-24. {{cite journal}}: More than one of |work= and |journal= specified (help)
  5. ^ "Agnes Denes". Archived from the original on 23 November 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-23. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  6. ^ Agnes Denes: Projects for Public Spaces
  7. ^ Denes, Agnes. "My work as an environmental artist". Retrieved 2008-10-26.
  8. ^ "Museum of Modern Art Online Collection".
  9. ^ "Metropolitan Museum Online Collection".
  10. ^ "Whitney Museum Online Collection".
  11. ^ "Winners of the Rome Prize for Work and Study Abroad". New York Times (April 19). 1997-04-19. Retrieved 2008-10-24. {{cite journal}}: More than one of |work= and |journal= specified (help)

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