What is Land Art?

From the late 1960s in the United States emerged Land Art-a term coined in 1969 by Gerry Schum-an art movement that rediscovered nature and landscape as tools and supports, which themselves became sculpture and installation. Major authors include Robert Smithson, Richard Long, Walter De Maria and Christo, famous for having completely enveloped large-scale monuments such as the Parliament Building in Berlin, or natural environments, such as a cliff in Australia or the very latest intervention The Flating Piers on Lake Iseo.

In Europe, Land Art is also a stimulus to artists who between the 1960s and 1970s are experimenting with new avenues such as Process Art and Arte Povera, however, the character it takes on in the Old Continent is in fact different: more intimate, meditative and above all far from creating works with a macroscopic character, the artist prefers gestures, walks and natural materials to create works of Art in Nature, as the European experience will be called. In fact, these two artistic dimensions - born in a social and historical context in which art was increasingly advancing an active social role, driven by the artists' own desire to engage, denounce, show and make people think - did not remain isolated and concluded cases, but were able to evolve and transform themselves into other forms of art, thanks in part to the ecological and environmentalist sensibility that from the 1980s onward was rampant in the Western world, aware of the danger the planet was running.

In addition to those already mentioned, the leading Land Art artists are Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, Beverly Pepper, and James Turrell, but Robert Morris (in 1966 he designed a large grass-covered earthen ring for an airport, but it was not until 1971 in Holland that he succeeded in materializing his Observatory project, a complex construction of concentric rings) is also the protagonist of notable environmental operations. The artist Alberto Burri, an Italian painter and sculptor and a leading international figure in postwar art, created, by covering the rubble of the now destroyed (by the earthquake) town of Gibellina, a famous and admirable example of Land Art that spans nearly 12 hectares, the Grande Cretto.