Through radical map projections, explored in her series Study of Distortion—Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space, and ecological proposals, Denes expands our understanding of the planet as both system and symbol. Anchored by documentation of iconic projects like Wheatfield—A Confrontation (1982), where Denes cultivated a wheat field in Manhattan as a symbol of global inequities, the exhibition highlights her deep commitment to sustainable futures.

At a time of escalating climate crises, Denes’ work asks us to reconsider how land and nature can foster collective responsibility and ecological renewal. 

Extending this inquiry into the present, the exhibition features a reading table displaying sketches for the artist's proposed public artwork, 1000 Sunflowers to Drive By, envisioned for the median along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. The project imagines a field of illuminated sunflowers transforming a stretch of urban infrastructure into a luminous landscape: an emblem of regeneration and shared care. Conceived in dialogue with The Future is Fragile, this proposal positions the exhibition as a stage for future growth and a platform for ongoing programmatic and artistic investigation.

Curated by Beth Stryker.

Agnes Denes

Agnes Denes is one of the most prominent artist of our time, recognized as a pioneer of ecological and land art, as well as other art forms. Often working on a monumental scale, her visionary work deals with environmental, cultural and social issues, immersed in science, philosophy, history, and psychology, addressing the challenges of global survival.

Wheatfield—A Confrontation, which the scholar and curator Jeffrey Weiss, has called “perpetually astonishing … one of Land Art’s great transgressive masterpieces” (Artforum, September 2008) is perhaps Agnes Denes’s best-known work. It was created during a four-month period in the spring and summer of 1982 when Denes, with the support of the Public Art Fund, planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center). Among her many other artistic achievements is Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule, a monumental earthwork, reclamation project and the first man-made virgin forest, situated in Ylöjärvi, Finland. The site was dedicated by the President of Finland upon its completion in 1996 and is legally protected for the next four hundred years.

Agnes Denes is also known for her innovative use of metallic inks and other nontraditional materials in creating a prodigious body of exquisitely rendered drawings and prints that delineate her explorations in mathematics, philosophy, geography, science and other disciplines. Works by Denes are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Kunsthalle Nürnberg and many other major institutions worldwide.

She has completed public and private commissions in North and South America, Europe, Australia and the Middle East, and has received numerous honors and awards including four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and four grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; the DAAD Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (1978); the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award (1985); M.I.T's highly prestigious Eugene McDermott Achievement Award “In Recognition of Major Contribution to the Arts” (1990); the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1998); the Watson Trans-disciplinary Art Award from Carnegie Mellon University (1999); the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007); and the Ambassador's Award for Cultural Diplomacy for Strengthening the Friendship between the US and the Republic of Hungary through Excellence in Contemporary Art (2008).

Denes holds honorary doctorates from Ripon College, Ripon, Wisconsin and Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania and has had fellowships at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. She lectures extensively at colleges and universities throughout the United States and abroad and participates in global conferences. She is the author of six books and is featured in numerous other publications on a wide range of subjects in art and the environment.

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1931, Agnes Denes was raised in Sweden and educated in the United States. Since her exhibition career began in the 1960s, she has participated in more than 450 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world including, among others, solo shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1974); the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1979) and retrospective surveys at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (1992); the Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pa. (2003); and the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2008). Her work has also been featured in such international surveys as the Biennale of Sydney (1976); Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977); the Venice Biennale (1978, 1980, 2001), and more recently The Last Freedom: From the Pioneers of Land Art of the 1960s to Nature in Cyberspace, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany (October 16, 2011); Systems, Actions & Processes: 1965–1975, PROA Foundation, Buenos Aires (through September, 2011); Erre: Variations Labyrinthiques, Centre Pompidou, Metz (September 12, 2011 – March 5, 2012); and Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph: 1964 – 1977, Art Institute of Chicago (December 11, 2011 – March 11, 2012).

Agnes Denes is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Graphic design support generously provided by Handbuilt
Additional support provided by UAP
Special thanks to Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

Above Image: The Future is Fragile, Handle With Care (Pyramid) 2021
Copyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Culturunners and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

There is no sound without space. In this exhibition, Christoph Meier and Chadwick Rantanen instrumentalize the exhibition site for its material resonance. The works frame and mirror the gallery, walking its perimeter and reflecting its activities. Here the Garage Top Gallery can be better viewed as a resonant chamber reverberating around the inconspicuous works concealed inside it.

Christoph Meier and Chadwick Rantanen both produce work using the gallery and exhibition as a site for intervention and negotiation. They incorporate the language of institutional critique while drawing in other subjects, like healthcare, hospitality, and commercial manufacturing. Independently, each has turned to sound in their practices as both subject and medium.

For this exhibition Meier produced untitled (Hollywood) (2025), a rectangular polished steel plate, playable by the viewer. Continuing his work with Grassmayr Bell Foundry, a 400 year old foundry in Innsbruck, Austria, untitled (Hollywood) acts as both a mirror and a portal in the exhibition space, with its delicate polished surface interrupted only by triangular cuts in the plate producing specific notes when sounded. The piece negotiates the visible and invisible, moving from a silent mirror blending into its surroundings to a sonorous vibrating mirage.

In Changers (2025), Rantanen continues his use of straightened coat hangers, brackets, and connectors, suffusing the space with seemingly improvised wire modules running along and punctuating the walls. The wire junctions both adhere to and corrupt the orderliness of the space. The skeletal web-like forms function as an infrastructure for moving energy but are left inoperable. A collection of loose ends, abrupt and unfulfilled.

Garage Exchange: Christoph Meier and Chadwick Rantanen oscillates between explosion and calm, passing material qualities back and forth. A polished plate crashes and the guttural jangling of wires soon falls silent. Energy is captured in tension, channeling the machines toward unknown directions.

Artists

CHRISTOPH MEIER

Christoph Meier (b. 1980, Vienna) studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Glasgow School of Art. His internationally exhibited, installation-based work often engages with architectural and social spaces. Meier has participated in numerous exhibitions, including at the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Wiener Festwochen, Portland Institute of Art, Etablissement d’en face Brussels, and the Nam June Paik Art Center Seoul. He has presented solo exhibitions at venues such as Casino Luxembourg, Kiosk Gent, Kunstverein Hamburg, Kunsthaus Graz, and the Vienna Secession. Since 2009, Meier has co-published the artist fanzine BLACK PAGES with Ute Müller and Nick Oberthaler and, in 2016, co-founded the independent exhibition space Guimarães in Vienna. From 2019 to 2020, he was professor at the Institute of Art and Design at the Vienna University of Technology, where he now works as a senior artist at the Research Unit for Three-Dimensional Design and Model Making. Recently Meier has realized Gills Bells, a large-scale carillon as a public artwork in Gilsdorf, Luxembourg.

CHADWICK RANTANEN

Chadwick Rantanen (b. 1981, Wausau, WI) appropriates the forms of familiar consumer goods and modifies and re-contextualizes them into sculptural tools. Adapting and conforming to architecture and infrastructure, Rantanen’s sculptures mimic installations or site-specific works, often taking the form of an adaptor, wedging between objects and their sources of power, articulating a web of accommodation, compromise, maintenance and parasitism by slightly detouring energy, but never causing harm. His solo exhibitions include Secession, Vienna, Austria; Museo Pietro Canonica, Rome, Italy; Standard (Oslo), Oslo, Norway; Essex Street, New York, New York; Overduin and Co., Los Angeles, California; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, Bel Ami, Los Angeles, California; CAPITAL, San Francisco, California. 


ABOUT GARAGE EXCHANGE

Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles seeks to foster relationships, conversations and collaborations in the arts between Los Angeles and Austria. In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, the Austrian Federal Chancellery and the MAK Center invite Austrian and Vienna-based alumni residents to collaborate with L.A. artists and architects of their choosing at the Garage Top at the Mackey Apartments for the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series.

Garage Exchange: Christoph Meier and Chadwick Rantanen is curated by Seymour Polatin, Exhibitions and Programs Manager. This exhibition is made possible with support from the Federal Ministry European and International Affairs Republic of Austria, the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles, and Bildrecht.