As a child in Budapest in the 1930s Agnes Denes decided she would be a poet, but history got in the way. She and her parents survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary, moved to Sweden after the war and then to the United States a few years later, when she was in her teens. Along the way “I lost my language because we traveled so much,” Ms. Denes, 81, said in a recent interview. So she became a visual artist instead.
“The creativity had to come out in some way,” she said. “It blurted itself out in a visual form.”
After marrying at least once (she prefers not to discuss her personal past) and having a son, Ms. Denes began building a career as a painter. But she soon found the medium too limiting. “What bothered me mostly was the edge of the canvas,” she said in her heavily accented English. “I always wanted to go beyond it. I always had more to say.”
In the late ’60s she broke away from painting completely and soon turned to a wide variety of other mediums, taking on an ever-expanding universe of interests and ideas. In 1968, for example, she created what some believe to be the first ecologically conscious earthwork, “Rice/ Tree/Burial,” a performance piece that 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.”
And at around the same time she embarked on more precise and formally oriented body of work, which she called Visual Philosophy — diagrammatic drawings inspired by her interest in mathematics, philosophy and symbolic logic. “It would be very hard on people to look at stern mathematical concepts,” Ms. Denes said, explaining that she had studied each discipline closely to make the work. “But I make them so beautiful that you are taken in by the beauty. And while you’re taken in by the beauty, I got you to think.”
Leslie Tonkonow, her primary dealer, said that from the start “Agnes distinguished herself in terms of the breadth of subjects that she was exploring and the imaginative way she was doing it, and the fact that her work was incredibly cerebral and intellectually driven but, at the same time, incredibly aesthetic.”
“It’s difficult to get your head around all the things she’s done,” Ms. Tonkonow added. “I do honestly think that’s why she hasn’t been a household name.”
Which is not to say she hasn’t earned ardent supporters, including Agnes Gund, the philanthropist and president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, who has steadily collected her drawings for years. Some are now in the Modern’s collection; she is also in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Whitney Museum of American Art and many other museums around the world, and has been commissioned to make public art in cities as far-flung as Melbourne, Australia, and Ylöjärvi, Finland.
But now her work, in all its variety, is being introduced to new audiences in shows on both coasts of the United States, “Sculptures of the Mind: 1968 to Now,” a solo exhibition at Ms. Tonkonow’s gallery in Chelsea (through Jan. 19), and “Agnes Denes: Body Prints, Philosophical Drawings and Map Projections: 1969-1978,” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (through Dec. 22).
The Santa Monica show focuses on Ms. Denes’s diagrammatic drawings and map projections, in which she tweaks earth science by reimagining the planet in fanciful shapes like a snail’s shell, a pyramid and a hot dog. Also on view are her body prints of 1970-71, made by coating her own breasts and her former husband’s penis with fingerprint ink and using them as stamps to suggest globes and forests, as if to imply how the intimate can evoke the universal.
The Chelsea show, meanwhile, offers documentation from “Rice/Tree/Burial,“ which Ms. Denes re-enacted on a grander scale in 1977-79, as well as other earthworks. One group of rarely seen photographs documents her first major public piece, “Wheatfield — A Confrontation,” commissioned by the Public Art Fund in 1982, for which she planted and harvested two acres of wheat on the landfill that now holds Battery Park City. Positioned below the World Trade Center and facing the Statue of Liberty, the field was a statement that “represented the ideals of this country, and money,” Ms. Denes said, as well as “mismanagement, the use of the land, the misuse of the land, and world hunger.”
The show also has examples of philosophical drawings and a triangular wall relief conceived in 1987 that Ms. Denes finally realized this year, as well as a 1969 installation made with cremated human remains and some fascinating early Lucite sculptures whose parts she carved, bent, electroplated and wired herself. “Honey, I experimented with dozens of different things,“ she said at the opening. “That’s how I did everything.”
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. That’s what first hooked Gary Garrels, the senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who has followed her work since 1980. “That’s what she always talks about: How do you give visual form to ideas?” he said. “Her drawing in that regard is really, really exceptional. There’s an elegance and a kind of succinctness. It’s a beautiful distillation.”
The combination of aesthetics and intellect was apparent on a recent tour of Ms. Denes’s SoHo studio, where she showed off (among many other things) a 1994 series of prints depicting lyrically torqued pyramids that appeared to float in space. Made with colored ink to which she had applied gold and silver dust, a process of her own invention, the delicate shapes sparkled and changed their hues as one walked around them. (These seductive drawings also turned out to be, Ms. Denes said quite seriously, designs for “future cities that we need to live in when the weather changes.”)
Yet while Ms. Denes has spent much energy introducing sensual beauty into her work, her own personal environment is almost ascetic. The loft, where she has lived since 1980, has a few cozy touches, like lace curtains and a curiosity cabinet filled with decorative china, but it is also freezing cold. And the only way to walk across the space is through a narrow path delineated by carefully wrapped stacks of her work.
Before moving there, Ms. Denes said, “I had a beautiful living situation,” in an apartment full of antiques. She gave it up to live in her studio, she added, because “I wanted to roll out of bed to make art.”
Today she still has the same urge. Sitting at her kitchen table in the tiny portion of the loft that is her living space, she talked avidly about some of her plans and projects, from the realistic to the fantastical: completing an amphitheater shaped like a nautilus for a community college in Connecticut; creating more forests to preserve endangered plant species (she has already realized two such projects); building a group of elaborate time capsules that she’d hoped to bury in Antarctica before the polar caps started melting; or designing more “self-contained, self-supporting city dwellings” to protect the human race from the weather. “I feel so much love and compassion for humanity,” she said, “and I feel so sorry for us, the problems the world is having.”
But even if she’s no longer hemmed in by the edge of the canvas, Ms. Denes remains frustrated by limitations. “There’s a lot of things that I want to do that I didn’t get to do yet,” she said. “I feel so restricted at being caught in my lifetime.”
