One of the most prominent artists of our time, AGNES DENES is a leading pioneer of environmental art whose works deal with cultural and social issues that address the challenges of global survival. She is also internationally known for works created in a wide range of mediums, investigating science, philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, poetry, history, and music.

In 1968, Denes created Rice/Tree/Burial in Sullivan County, New York, acknowledged as the first site-specific piece with ecological concerns. Wheatfield—A Confrontation, Denes’s iconic Land art piece, was created in 1982 when she 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). With the support of the Trussardi Foundation, Denes's Wheatfield was replanted in 2015 on twelve acres of land in central Milan, Italy. Wheatfield—An Inspiration, engaged with the local community in Bozeman, Montana, where it was enacted in 2024 at Tinworks. In 2024, Art Basel paid tribute to the work by planting wheat in front of the exhibition hall and displaying video and photographic documentation of the original work during the run of the fair in Basel, Switzerland..

Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule, Denes’s monumental earthwork, reclamation project, and the world’s first man-made virgin forest is situated in Ylöjärvi, in western 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. The Living Pyramid, a monumental sculptural work comprised of earth, wood, and plants, commissioned in 2015 by the Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island, City, New York, was recreated in 2017 for Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany; at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum Museum in Istanbul in 2022; and at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2023. In 2025, it was featured in Desert X, in Palm Springs, California, and at MUDAM, Luxembourg. It is currently on view in Desert X 2026 in AlUla, Saudi Arabia.

The artist is currently working on a series of monumentally-scaled commissioned works for Wadi AlFann, a major cultural site in AlUla, Saudi Arabia.

Denes has completed numerous public and private commissions in North and South America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, and has received many honors and awards. She holds honorary doctorates from Ripon College, Ripon, Wisconsin and Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and fellowships from the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. She is the author of six books and is featured in many other publications on a wide range of subjects on art and the environment.

Born in Hungary in 1931, Denes lived in Sweden before arriving in the U.S. in the early 1950s. She has participated in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions and her works are in the collections of important institutions throughout the world. A highly critically acclaimed survey of her work that included three newly commissioned sculptures ran from October 2019 to March 2020 at The Shed, New York.

Works by the artist were also recently seen in The Milk of Dreams, the main exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia, 2022; Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2023; Dear Earth: Art in a Time of Crisis, Hayward Gallery, London, 2023; Groundswell: Women of Land Art, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, 2023; The Irreplaceable Human: The Conditions of Creativity in the Age of AI, Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 2023–24); Abstraction After Modernism: Recent Acquisitions, Menil Collection, Houston, 2024; Extreme Tension: Art between Politics and Society 1945–2000, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany, 2025; Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991, Mudam Luxembourg, 2024–25; Science / Fiction: A Non-History of Plants, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, 2024–2025; Shifting Landscapes, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2024–26; and Save Land: United for Land, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, Germany, 2024–2025.

A full-scale survey, Systems of Logic / Logic of Systems: The Art and Mind of Agnes Denes, was on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest from December 12, 2024 to June 1, 2025.

Works by Agnes Denes are in the collections of important museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.; the Menil Collection, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Tate Gallery, London, the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, among many other major institutions world wide.

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