PARIS.- Walter De Maria’s final sculpture, Truck Trilogy, will be shown for the first time outside of the United States in an exhibition at Gagosian’s Le Bourget gallery beginning on October 19, the month that would have marked De Maria’s ninetieth birthday. Incorporating three classic pickup trucks from the 1950s, the sculpture has been presented only once before, at Dia Beacon in New York, from 2017 to 2019. Shown alongside a selection of other rarely seen sculptures, drawings, films, and archival materials, Truck Trilogy is the centerpiece of an exhibition that illuminates De Maria’s lifelong preoccupation with precise measurement and the imagined. The Singular Experience is curated by Donna De Salvo, senior adjunct curator at Dia Art Foundation, the entity that commissioned, maintains, and manages access to the sites of De Maria’s world-renowned permanent installations: The Lightning Field (1977), The Broken Kilometer (1979), The New York Earth Room (1977), and The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977).

Conceived in 2011 and completed posthumously in 2017 according to his specific directions, De Maria’s final work comprises three Chevrolet Advance Design 3100 pickup trucks, iconic models manufactured from the late 1940s to mid-1950s, when the artist was a young man. Polished, stripped of all extraneous elements and therefore function, and fitted with upright stainless-steel rods in their finished oak panel beds, they stand as monuments both austere and hallucinatory. A different configuration of triangular, square, and circular rods crowns each vehicle, turning tools of transport into geometric beacons of reflection. At once humorous and solemn, industrial and metaphysical, the work condenses De Maria’s pursuit of fusing hard fact with wonder. Truck Trilogy is complemented by 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows (1985), a floor sculpture that consists of forty-two polished polygonal solid stainless-steel rods arranged horizontally in three rows, each successive row increasing by a meter in length. The work attests to De Maria’s fascination with mathematical sequences that produce visual harmony, while also reflecting viewers’ movements.

De Maria was a trained percussionist, and rhythmical patterns, frequency, and perceptions of harmony can be traced throughout his expansive oeuvre back to the 1960s, when he was an integral member of avant-garde music projects in downtown New York. A founding member of the Druds—a band with Andy Warhol, Patty and Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Larry Poons, and La Monte Young—De Maria went on to play drums with the Primitives, a band that would later become the Velvet Underground, and produced sculptural and conceptual works directly connected to music.

Musical and poetic qualities of meter and repetition are found throughout the works at Le Bourget. The layout of the five sequential entries from 10 through 17-Sided Open Polygons (1984) encourages further awareness of distance, angle, and the viewer’s physical presence. Drawings—such as the enigmatic Invisible Flying Saucer drawings (1974)—and films such as Hard Core (1969) and Three Circles and Two Lines in the Desert (1969) satisfy De Maria’s criterion that “every work should have at least ten meanings” and underscore the breadth of his practices, which were rigorous yet playful, systematic yet imaginative.

This duality can be found elsewhere in Paris, in De Maria’s Monument to the Bicentennial of the French Revolution 1789–1989 Located at the Assemblée Nationale, Paris (1989–90). Commissioned to commemorate the bicentennial, the hard geometric form of the granite sphere’s base conceals an 18-karat gold heart embedded within, testifying to the tenderness beneath precisely calculated forms and structures.

This public work, the exhibition at Le Bourget, and De Maria’s inclusion in the concurrent exhibition Minimal, curated by Dia Art Foundation’s director, Jessica Morgan, at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, offer a broad view of De Maria as more than a figure of Land art or Minimalism, but as an artist who allowed humanity to be seen within the precision of engineering and mathematical calculation. The Le Bourget exhibition embraces De Maria’s ethos of resistance to fixed interpretations, emphasizing instead the direct, unmediated relationship between viewer and artwork—or, as the esteemed critic David Bourdon once wrote, “the singular experience.”

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Estate of Walter De Maria, with the support of Elizabeth Childress, director of the Walter De Maria Archive.