He was best known for large-scale outdoor works that often involved simple if rather extravagant ideas or gestures: a SoHo loft filled with two feet of earth, for example, or a solid brass rod two inches in diameter and one kilometer long driven into the ground in Kassel, Germany, so that only its smooth top was visible (a work consistent with an artist who once noted that “the invisible is real”). — New York Times
De Maria was born in Albany, Calif., and eventually settled in New York. His work was more widely shown abroad than in the U.S., and he had major exhibitions in Japan and Europe.
Some of his installations are still on view to the public. In addition to "The Lightning Field" in New Mexico, he created "The New York Earth Room," at 141 Wooster St. in New York; and "The Broken Kilometer" at 393 West Broadway, also in New York.
In addition to his art career, De Maria was a sometime musician who played drums for the New York-based rock band The Primitives in the 1960s.
His most famous creation was “The Lightning Field,” which opened in 1977 in western New Mexico after several years of trial-and-error construction. The work is a grid of 400 stainless steel poles averaging 20 ½ feet in height and spaced 220 feet apart covering an area 1 kilometer by 1 mile.
In October, the artist presented his installation "The 2000 Sculpture" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it occupied most of the Resnick Pavilion. The piece consisted of 2,000 white rods arranged to form a geometric tesselation, creating different reflections of light.
