Events RBG

Earth Art Exhibit: View QuickTime movie (streaming large file, may take a moment to start)

Summer 2009 — July 3 to Thanksgiving

Dennis Oppenheim
Spiral Scarecrows is a vortex surrounded by numerous figures – traditionally called scarecrows – that journey along the parameters of the spiral, increasing in number as they converge upon the centre. This is a garden based on hysteria: The ever increasing paranoia emanating from the fear of invading predators becomes the rationale by which the garden is designed.

Bio: Dennis Oppenheim (USA)
Retrospectives of Dennis Oppenheim’s seminal works have been organized by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Musee d’art Contemporain in Montreal and PS 1 in New York. He is one of the founding members of the Earth Art movement, and continues to travel and show extensively around the world, with a focus on public commissions.

Oppenheim was born on September 6, 1938 in Electric City near the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, USA. His family moved to Richmond, California where he went to high school and then to art school at the California College of Arts and Crafts. He obtained a Masters of Fine Art from Stanford University in 1965.

In 1966 he moved to New York. His first one-person show there was at the John Gibson Gallery in 1968, followed solo shows in Europe at Yvon Lambert in Paris and Francoise Lambert in Milano. Land Art, Body Art, video and performance in the ’60s was followed in the ’70s by installations which questioned the nature of the artistic process, the self and the concept of representation. Large-scale machine iconography was used in the sculpture of the ’80s as a metaphor for the thought process. Metaphor in works in the ’90 came from transformations of altered common forms.