Born in Budapest in 1931, and living and working in New York since the 1950s, Agnes Denes spent her teenage years in Stockholm. There she conceived her first environmental work, The Bird Project. It has inspired her newest work, Bird Migration, a poetic discourse on the artist’s personal history told in her own voice and through multiple filmed images of an array of migratory birds. While this work is anchored in the artist’s early life experiences, it simultaneously presents bird formations in the sky as universal signs of departure and temporal shifts. Produced specifically for the exhibition, with the support of Lunds konsthall, it will enter the art collection of the City of Lund.
Since the 1960s, Denes has addressed cultural and social issues challenging global survival. One of the most prominent artists of our time, she is internationally known for works created in a wide range of mediums, investigating science, mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, poetry, history, and music—virtually all aspects of human endeavor.
In 1968, she enacted Rice/Tree/Burial as a private event in Sullivan County, New York. Acknowledged as the first site work with specific ecological concerns, it announced her life-long commitment to creating environmental works to benefit humanity, as well as the philosophical concept of Dialectical Triangulation that has informed her work to this day. A large-scale version of Rice/Tree/Burial was presented by the artist ten years later at Artpark in Lewiston, New York, adjacent to Niagara Falls which became an added element of the work. Additionally, the artist’s first time capsule, containing the microfilmed responses to a questionnaire on the future of humanity, was buried with instructions to be opened in 1000 years, and commemorated with a plaque on the site.
Denes’s questionnaires and time capsules, forming an ongoing series in which she engages local populations in dialogue with the future, continue to be created for exhibitions and installations across the globe. 39 of the artist’s own photographs documenting Rice/Tree/Burial  (1977–79) are on view in the exhibition, which also features a new questionnaire and time capsule, which will then be buried in a suitable place, adding an important dimension to the presentation of her work in Lund.
Denes has created monumental site works around the world but her most iconic project may be the site-specific intervention Wheatfield—A Confrontation from 1982, for which she planted a wheat field in Lower Manhattan, adjacent to Wall Street and the World Trade Center in New York’s Financial District. It confirmed her position as the leading figure within the expanding field of ecologically based art. With its emphasis on socio-economic realities, Wheatfield is another example of Denes’s early concern for the environment that remains inspirational for younger generations of artists, architects, and the public at large. In 2015 it was recreated on 12 acres in central Milan and will be the focus of a new presentation in June 2024 at Tinworks Art in Montana.
To deepen the understanding of Denes’s thinking, the exhibition also includes prints from her early series Philosophical Drawings. Also on view is a selection of images from Psychograph (1970–72), an investigation of communication and conscious (or unconscious) behavior in social contexts, for which she distributed a penetrating questionnaire to various art world colleagues which were then analyzed by two licensed psychologists. The study of the contemporary and predominantly male artistic elite follows in execution and presentation the artist's characteristic approach and expression which is evident in all her works. Here is the scientific method, the mathematical calculation, the philosophical and psychological insight and the poetic presentation.
Agnes Denes (born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1931) lives and works in New York. She has participated in more than 700 exhibitions and has realised public commissions all over the world. She is internationally recognised as the leading pioneer of the environmental art movement and a primary figure in creating concept-based art. The full-scale survey exhibition Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates took place at The Shed, New York in 2019, following three previous museum retrospectives. Denes has participated in such major international surveys as Documenta 6 and Documenta 14 in Kassel, the Venice Biennales of 1978, 1980, 2001 and 2022 and group shows at major institutions worldwide including, among many others, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and most recently the Hayward and Barbican Art Galleries in London, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, and Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. She has received grants and fellowships from, among many others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh or the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She also holds honorary doctorates from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin. Agnes Denes is the author of six books and her work is regularly featured in a variety of publications on a wide range of topics within art and the environment.