The 2000 Sculpture

The American artist Walter de Maria (1935-2013) started to explore the boundaries of an extended concept of art in the 1960s. Over the course of his career, he created important works in the fields of minimal art, land art, concept art and performance. He also played the drums with the Primitives, a band that was a precursor of The Velvet Underground.

The 2000 Sculpture by Walter de Maria is one of the world's largest floor sculptures. It belongs to a series of works in which the artist arranged changing sets of elements in specific patterns. The 2000 Sculpture comprises 2,000 plaster rods, each 50 cm long and 11.8 to 12 cm high. Despite their uniform size, the individual elements have varying shapes in that they have five, seven or nine sides. They are laid out across 500 square metres (10 x 50 m) in twenty rows of 100 plaster elements each. The arrangement of the elements follows a specific rhythm and mirrors the number of sides: 5-7-9-7-5-5-7-9-7-5.

Despite its size, the observer perceives The 2000 Sculpture as a unit that includes the surrounding architectural space, adding a spatial dimension to the experience. In this monumental work, the surrounding space is as important as the sculpture itself. Curator Harald Szeeman described this as "a new quality of contemporary sculpture that no longer wants to be an object, but a subject that shapes and fills the surrounding space".

More than any other thing, besides the exhibition space itself, it is light that shapes the perception of The 2000 Sculpture. Walter de Maria therefore stipulated that the sculpture must be shown by daylight only. This was to make sure that visitors could see the plaster rods' varied shades of white and the shadows they cast, as well as how they keep changing according to the weather and the time of day. The fact that the weather changes the observer's perception of the sculpture is also a reference to de Maria's involvement with land art. The effect of the work only unfolds through chronology; the various perspectives of the The 2000 Sculpture and of its rows only reveal themselves to the observer through their moving across the room.

In 1977, Walter de Maria had already become a world-wide success with his work The Lightning Field. On a mesa in New Mexico, he arranged 400 stainless, pointed steel poles in a rectangular 1 mile x 1 kilometre grid. The array of steel poles is being framed by the surrounding landscape, while simultaneously framing it itself. The light and the clouds are endlessly reflected and refracted on the stainless steel poles. The work's title suggests that the steel poles attract lightning, that they act as lightning rods. Visitors are encouraged to spend as much time as possible on site - there is even a log cabin nearby in which they can stay overnight.

For the Documenta VI in Kassel in the same year (1977), de Maria had a 1,000 metre long and five centimetres wide brass rod vertically inserted into the ground for his work The Vertical Earth Kilometer. The upper end, which has the appearance of a five-centimetre brass disc, is embedded in a red sandstone plate. The largest part of the work is therefore hidden from the observer's view. The Vertical Earth Kilometer has been equally attributed to the genres of minimal, concept and land art, bringing together the three predominant artistic movements of the 1970s.

The 2000 Sculpture unites many foundational aspects of Walter de Maria's work: the permutations of similar elements, the exploration of mathematical forms and experimentation with three-dimensional space, light and time. However, unlike in his other works, de Maria does not use modules made of brass, stainless steel or stone for The 2000 Sculpture, but plaster.

On one hand, the title of the sculpture references the then upcoming turn of the millennium, and on the other hand, it is the number of modules contained in the sculpture. Throughout his life, Walter de Maria was interested in extreme events and turning points in human history, which explains his fascination with the historical moment that was the turn of the millennium. His intention was to create an artistic interpretation of this moment and mark it with a monumental work that befitted the occasion.

Thomas and Cristina Bechtler first met de Maria during the ten-year preparation phase for the first exhibition of The 2000 Sculpture in the Kunsthaus Zürich; they soon became close friends. As the president of the Zurich Art Society, Thomas Bechtler personally campaigned for the purchase of The 2000 Sculpture for the Kunsthaus Zürich's collection, where the work would be periodically on display every five to ten years. When this endeavour failed, Thomas and Ruedi Bechtler decided to buy The 2000 Sculpture for the Walter A. Bechtler-Stiftung instead.

After its first exhibition in the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1992, The 2000 Sculpture was shown twice more, in the large temporary exhibition hall of the Kunsthaus Zürich during the exhibition cycles of 1999/2000 and 2021/2022. In the year 2000, the work was also shown at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin. The 2,000-piece sculpture even travelled across the Atlantic to the West Coast of the United States in 2012 for yet another exhibition, this time at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Due to there only being a handful of pillar-free venues with sufficient floor space to house The 2000 Sculpture worldwide, Thomas and Cristina Bechtler decided to create a place in Switzerland where the sculpture could be exhibited permanently. When a first attempt to give the sculpture a permanent home in the Engadin failed, Walter de Maria brought the Zellweger area to the table, an estate in Uster, the development of which had just started at that point. As representatives of the Walter A. Bechtler-Stiftung, Ruedi and Thomas Bechtler subsequently initiated the project for creating a suitable venue on this former estate of the Zellweger-Luwa company. The construction works concluded at the end of 2021, and shortly after The 2000 Sculpture was installed as the centrepiece of the new exhibition venue.