Beacon, New York, February 2, 2024 – Opening at Dia Beacon on February 16, 2024, an expansive exhibition by Meg Webster brings her unique perspective to Dia’s galleries for the first time. Featuring rarely displayed works which recently entered Dia’s permanent collection, the long-term exhibition includes Webster’s signature concave and convex earthworks complemented by sculptures constructed in beeswax, moss, salt, and sticks.

Drawing on the conceptual tenets of Minimalist and Land art of the 1960s and ’70s, Webster has brought loose natural materials—such as soil, sand, and salt—indoors since the mid-1980s, shaping them into sculptures and installations. Her body of work spans ambitious geometric sculptures, monochrome paintings made with organic substances which lend them their colors and scents, and hydraulic and grow-light installations that may be sited within or outside the gallery.

“This exhibition brings together works that collectively illustrate a pivotal period in Meg Webster’s practice, where her distinctive sculptural language was formalized. The addition to Dia’s collection and Dia Beacon’s galleries extends our long-standing support of artists working within a serial, conceptual framework, and supplements it with Webster’s wider ecological sensitivity,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.

Presented in the galleries abutting the west gardens, the exhibition comprises nine large-scale sculptures, five of which are now in Dia’s permanent collection. Joining strict minimal geometries with the inherent looseness of natural materials, Webster’s works sustain both tension and stillness as the sculptural forms hold their shape against gravity and provoke a state of heightened attentiveness to nature.

Exemplary of Webster’s investigations into concave and convex volumes, works such as Concave Earth (1986–90) and Mother Mound (1990) feature primary forms compressed into shape from loose soil, at once solid and friable. A golden curving wall made of fragrant beeswax, Wall of Beeswax (1990) sets the body in motion and engages the entire sensorium. The cylindrical Copper Containing Salt (1990) contrasts varying elemental materials and stages the tension of fullness and spilling. Additional works on view demonstrate Webster’s ability to wield materials such as moss and sticks into pure geometry.

Seen together, the works comprise an ecosystem where color, scent, and sound enter a dialogue with the natural elements outside. In doing so, the sculptures add a unique ecological perspective to the formal concerns that animate the art in Dia’s collection.

“When Webster’s sculptures debuted in New York art galleries in the late 1980s, their unadulterated materiality compressed into precise volumes felt primal, even hallucinatory to many commentators. The works presented in her long-term exhibition bring that impactful encounter with nature to Dia Beacon and reopen a dialogue with an earlier generation of Minimalist artists and peers, including Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, and Richard Serra,” said Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head.

Meg Webster is curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head, with Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund. 

Meg Webster is made possible by lead support from Their Excellencies Sheikh Jassim and Sheikha Al Mayassa Al-Thani. Significant support by Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation.

About Dia Art Foundation

Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. 

In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally. These include: 

• Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all located in New York
• De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in western New Mexico
• Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
• Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
• De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany 
• Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)

 For additional information or materials, contact: 

(U.S. press inquiries)
Hannah Gompertz, Dia Art Foundation, hgompertz@diaart.org, +1 212 293 5598
Melissa Parsoff, Parsoff Communications, mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com, +1 516 445 5899

(International press inquiries)
Sam Talbot, sam@sam-talbot.com, +44 (0) 772 5184 630