Book Description

A recurrent theme that characterizes the work of Dennis Oppenheim (Electric City, Washington, 1938), one of the most unusual and adventurous of contemporary American artists, is the encounter between art and nature. His first work using land, in Oakland, was produced in 1967. From the beginning of the Seventies, his work began to take a wide variety of forms, from performance art to installations, from video to the production, at the end of the decade, of the machine pieces, three-dimensional structures animated by mechanical devices. In 1986, the work of the artist took another turn: his works, enormous imaginary objects, mutant and distorted, are all pervaded by a new violent and playful irony. This book presents Oppenheim's sculptural upside-down church Device to root out evil. Produced for Venice, this glass and aluminum sculpture, 12 metres high, 6 metres long, and 4 metres deep, balances only on the tip of the bell-tower.