AGNES DENES DOCUMENTARY

LYRA Art Foundation is proud to be supporting the upcoming documentary on the visionary artist and pioneer of ecological and land art, Agnes Denes. Directed by acclaimed documentarian Alexandra Shiva, with Ethan Hawke as the executive producer, the film will follow Denes, aged 94, as she works from her SoHo studio on large-scale projects taking shape around the world.

“Agnes is a series of contradictions, and therefore an extremely captivating documentary subject. She is physically frail, but her mind is razor sharp. She is homebound, but her inner creative life is boundless. She is intensely private, but finally for the first time, ready to open her world to the public. I see the film as embodying that spirit of contradiction and duality – it will be both an intimate dialogue with one of the greatest minds of our time and an expansive look at art, culture, society, and the environment.” –– Alexandra Shiva.

Born in Budapest in 1931 and having been based in New York since 1954, Agnes Denes is a visionary conceptual artist whose practice spans land art, poetry, writing, sculpture and drawing. A polymath and pioneer of ecological and land art, Denes often works on a monumental scale, drawing on frameworks of science, semiotics, epistemology, history, linguistics and psychology to question the relationship between humans and nature. Her work foregrounds the environmental and humanitarian challenges we collectively face, while conceptualising methodologies for navigating what lies ahead.

One of the first artists to incorporate environmental awareness into artistic practice, the work that brought Agnes Denes her international critical acclaim is Wheatfield — A Confrontation (1982). A 2.2-acre field of wheat was grown on the empty Battery Park landfill in Manhattan for four months in 1982. The golden field, with the skyscrapers of Wall Street in the background, was described by the artist as ‘a symbol, a universal concept’. A direct intervention in the metropolis, the work addressed the disparity between the urban and the rural realms, highlighting the issues of ecological neglect, the misuse of space, and the dissonance between real estate value and global environmental and social crises.

“I am fascinated with Agnes as an artist, who has been referred to as a modern-day Da Vinci. She is one of the most prolific living artists, yet most of her work has gone unseen and unrealized – until now.” –– Alexandra Shiva.

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