Gianfranco Gorgoni

For five decades, photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni (1941-2019) built his reputation as the premier documentarian of Land Art in the United States and beyond. After leaving Italy, Gorgoni began to make portraits of the leading artists of the New York scene, including Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Carl Andre and Richard Serra. \n \nHe has soon traveled with Heizer, Smithson and De Maria to the American West the late 1960s to create the works that would bring out the artistic practice of the limits of the gallery world. In Nevada, the New Mexico and Utah, these artists have embarked on major Land Art installations that would redefine artistic practice contemporary of the time. In many cases, Gorgoni was the only photographer present on the ground to document their projects, and his images often constitute the definitive photographic record of planning and the creation of these revolutionary works. \n \nPublished on the occasion of the first major exhibition of Gorgoni's Land Art photographic images at the Nevada Museum of Art, featuring more than fifty of his large-scale photographs scale, Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs includes an introduction by Ann M. Wolfe, Senior Curator and Deputy Director of the Family Andrea and John C. Deane at the Nevada Museum of Art, an essay by the late historian and art critic Germano Celant, whose contribution here is one of the last ones he wrote before his death in 2020, and William L. Fox, director Peter E. Pool of the Center for Art + Environment. \n \nGianfranco Gorgoni is a historical collection of photographs of legendary and lesser-known works by Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Ugo Rondinone and Charles Ross: Land Art Photographs is a new major assessment of one of the world's greatest art movements \n \n