This exhibition presents Walter De Maria’s work as a sustained exercise in refusal. Across sculpture, film, and drawing, decisions are reduced to number, length, weight, and interval. Once set, these parameters do not respond to interpretation. They persist.
The works do not ask to be understood. They ask to be stood within.
In Truck Trilogy, industrial vehicles are stripped of function and repurposed as carriers of vertical measure. Stainless steel rods rise from their beds with exacting neutrality. Nothing is adjusted for emphasis. The trucks do not perform; they hold. Measurement replaces gesture, and authorship recedes behind a fixed system that cannot be improved through attention.
This logic extends horizontally in 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows, where serial length unfolds across the floor. The numerical progression is clear, but it does not resolve into meaning. Walking alongside the rows activates perception without rewarding it. Experience emerges, but interpretation stalls. What changes is not the work, but the viewer’s position relative to it.
Films and drawings in the exhibition continue this structure through duration rather than image. Rhythm replaces narrative. Repetition replaces development. Time does not build toward conclusion; it sustains a condition.
What becomes evident is not De Maria’s mastery of form, but his insistence on limits. Precision here is not refinement. It is a way of preventing expression from entering the work. Measurement does not function to clarify meaning; it operates independently of it.
The exhibition does not argue for significance. It does not need to. Once the system is established, the work continues without explanation.
