Walter de Maria, The Singular Experience, 2025, Gagosian, Paris, installation view
2026. Walter de Maria
“Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals,” Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies (1957). They are, he continued, “the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.” On entering the unforgettable Walter De Maria exhibition “The Singular Experience,” at Gagosian’s Le Bourget gallery, the first thing one encounters is precisely this: cars.
Presented in the middle of the main exhibition room was the artist’s final work, Truck Trilogy, 2011–17. It consists of three Chevrolet Advance Design 3100 pickup trucks from the 1950s. De Maria (1935–2013) drove this kind of truck through the deserts of California and New Mexico in search of sites for his Land art projects, prospecting for the right spatial conditions. The three vehicles, painted green, red, and black, are arrayed on a slight diagonal. Each truck bed is lined with white-oak planks, from which rise three stainless-steel poles with square, circular, and triangular cross sections. In a gesture that gently mocks the artificial boundary between the pristine white cube and the dust and contingency of the outside world, De Maria relocates these road-borne protagonists into the gallery—not unlike his earlier displacement in The New York Earth Room, 1977, where he filled a Manhattan gallery with 140 tons of soil. The oscillation between inside and outside staged by Truck Trilogy echoes throughout his practice, often crystallizing into a tension between the intellectual and the natural—for instance, in the abstract vastness of a monumental drawing, conceivable almost only in the mind, translated into a pair of chalk lines through the Mojave Desert in Mile Long Drawing, 1968.
One could argue that the Chevy 3100 occupies, within American culture, a position analogous to that of the Citroën DS in postwar France, the model invoked by Barthes. The DS, pronounced déesse, “goddess,” functioned as a cultural emissary charged with symbolic density. Yet Barthes’s analogy between cars and Gothic cathedrals was never merely sociological. De Maria makes clear that a vehicle, like a cathedral, can be understood as a privileged site of encounter with the sublime. Even though it’s possible to read the cars as pedestals for the rods—similar stainless-steel sculptures, such as Large Rod Series: Pedestal Rods 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 1984 (not in the show), were exhibited on white pedestals—the uncanny juxtaposition of elements from two different volumetric orders is what draws the observer’s attention, suggesting that the combination of the car and the rod creates a unified sculpture.
Materially bulky, the works exhibit a calibrated elegance in the hyper-polished surfaces of both the trucks’ bodywork and the upright rods, all of which have mirrorlike skins that reflect not only the viewer but also their architectural surroundings. This phenomenological concern with reflection and perception comes sharply into focus in 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows, 1985: forty-two steel rods placed directly on the floor in three rows arranged at one-meter intervals, progressively composed of thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen rods, with each solid having a polygonal cross section, the number of faces corresponding to the number of rods in the row. Observing the work, one becomes acutely aware of the fragile arbitrariness of the systems by which we measure and stabilize the world.
The exhibition also includes a substantial selection of drawings, notes, and smaller sculptures. They reveal how De Maria’s objects magnetize meaning while resisting fixity or overinterpretation. One of the exhibition’s quiet strengths is that, in it, De Maria’s work seems newly relevant. His insistence on pause, on attention, on the slow apprehension of form, appears as a subtle critique not only of the advertising-saturated culture of the ’70s but also of today’s scattershot digital-led overstimulation and desensitization.
For De Maria, art did not need a determinate meaning; it “works” when it activates a polysemic field of memory and perception that suspends the viewer between familiarity and estrangement. His practice invites us to recover a lost capacity for wonder, to rediscover inexhaustible complexity in seemingly simple things. The singular experience he sought was never monumental for its own sake; it emerged instead from the precise displacement of matter and meaning, and from the quiet intensity of looking again.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 64, no. 8, April 2026
Presented in the middle of the main exhibition room was the artist’s final work, Truck Trilogy, 2011–17. It consists of three Chevrolet Advance Design 3100 pickup trucks from the 1950s. De Maria (1935–2013) drove this kind of truck through the deserts of California and New Mexico in search of sites for his Land art projects, prospecting for the right spatial conditions. The three vehicles, painted green, red, and black, are arrayed on a slight diagonal. Each truck bed is lined with white-oak planks, from which rise three stainless-steel poles with square, circular, and triangular cross sections. In a gesture that gently mocks the artificial boundary between the pristine white cube and the dust and contingency of the outside world, De Maria relocates these road-borne protagonists into the gallery—not unlike his earlier displacement in The New York Earth Room, 1977, where he filled a Manhattan gallery with 140 tons of soil. The oscillation between inside and outside staged by Truck Trilogy echoes throughout his practice, often crystallizing into a tension between the intellectual and the natural—for instance, in the abstract vastness of a monumental drawing, conceivable almost only in the mind, translated into a pair of chalk lines through the Mojave Desert in Mile Long Drawing, 1968.
One could argue that the Chevy 3100 occupies, within American culture, a position analogous to that of the Citroën DS in postwar France, the model invoked by Barthes. The DS, pronounced déesse, “goddess,” functioned as a cultural emissary charged with symbolic density. Yet Barthes’s analogy between cars and Gothic cathedrals was never merely sociological. De Maria makes clear that a vehicle, like a cathedral, can be understood as a privileged site of encounter with the sublime. Even though it’s possible to read the cars as pedestals for the rods—similar stainless-steel sculptures, such as Large Rod Series: Pedestal Rods 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 1984 (not in the show), were exhibited on white pedestals—the uncanny juxtaposition of elements from two different volumetric orders is what draws the observer’s attention, suggesting that the combination of the car and the rod creates a unified sculpture.
Materially bulky, the works exhibit a calibrated elegance in the hyper-polished surfaces of both the trucks’ bodywork and the upright rods, all of which have mirrorlike skins that reflect not only the viewer but also their architectural surroundings. This phenomenological concern with reflection and perception comes sharply into focus in 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows, 1985: forty-two steel rods placed directly on the floor in three rows arranged at one-meter intervals, progressively composed of thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen rods, with each solid having a polygonal cross section, the number of faces corresponding to the number of rods in the row. Observing the work, one becomes acutely aware of the fragile arbitrariness of the systems by which we measure and stabilize the world.
The exhibition also includes a substantial selection of drawings, notes, and smaller sculptures. They reveal how De Maria’s objects magnetize meaning while resisting fixity or overinterpretation. One of the exhibition’s quiet strengths is that, in it, De Maria’s work seems newly relevant. His insistence on pause, on attention, on the slow apprehension of form, appears as a subtle critique not only of the advertising-saturated culture of the ’70s but also of today’s scattershot digital-led overstimulation and desensitization.
For De Maria, art did not need a determinate meaning; it “works” when it activates a polysemic field of memory and perception that suspends the viewer between familiarity and estrangement. His practice invites us to recover a lost capacity for wonder, to rediscover inexhaustible complexity in seemingly simple things. The singular experience he sought was never monumental for its own sake; it emerged instead from the precise displacement of matter and meaning, and from the quiet intensity of looking again.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 64, no. 8, April 2026
Walter de Maria, The Singular Experience, 2025, Gagosian, Paris, installation views
Walter de Maria, Shadow with red car, c. 1961-64, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 45.7 x 61 cm
Walter de Maria, Black Truck / Triangle, Circle, Square from Truck Trilogy, 2011-17, 3 1950s Chevrolet half-ton pickup trucks, white oak, and stainless steel, in 3 parts, each: 304.8 x 190.5 x 495.3 cm, overall dimensions variable
Walter de Maria, Green Truck / Triangle, Circle, Square from Truck Trilogy, 2011-17, 3 1950s Chevrolet half-ton pickup trucks, white oak, and stainless steel, in 3 parts, each: 304.8 x 190.5 x 495.3 cm, overall dimensions variable
Walter de Maria, Red Truck / Triangle, Circle, Square from Truck Trilogy, 2011-17, 3 1950s Chevrolet half-ton pickup trucks, white oak, and stainless steel, in 3 parts, each: 304.8 x 190.5 x 495.3 cm, overall dimensions variable