Three ‘SIR artists’ during the Public Art Fund´s Summer Exhibition Program in New York
Public Art Fund announced its 2012 summer exhibition program, in which three SIR artists are represented: Paola Pivi, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Paul McCarthy. Opening on May 24, Common Ground, a group exhibition featuring sculpture, installation, and performance, looks at how different works of art approach the idea of public sculpture and civic engagement. Opening on June 20 is Paola Pivi’s How I Roll, a mesmerizing kinetic sculpture featuring a rotating plane conceived for Doris C. Freedman Plaza. On July 19, Public Art Fund presents the first site-specific exhibition for Brooklyn Bridge Park—Oscar Tuazon’s People.
Common Ground
May 24 – November 30, 2012
City Hall Park
Traditional public monuments and statues had a clear civic purpose, many having been commissioned to commemorate an important event, notable individual, or significant group. The artists featured in this show—Elmgreen & Dragset, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Roger Hiorns, Jenny Holzer, Matthew Day Jackson, Christian Jankowski, Justin Matherly, Paul McCarthy, Amalia Pica, and Thomas Schütte—have taken this tradition of civic sculpture and expanded upon it. Developing a new civic dialogue, the show explores the reappropriation of iconography from classical sculpture; engagement with themes of the individual and society; incorporation of language, symbolism, and metaphor; and the use of non-traditional materials and performance, among other themes. The exhibition reveals how a work of art that articulates an artist’s personal vision might also be thought of as having a civic function, value, or engagement.
Paola Pivi – How I Roll
June 20 – August 26, 2012
Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park
Through the recontextualization of familiar subjects, objects, and places, Paola Pivi’s work creates surprising and enigmatic situations that challenge viewers’ perceptions. Whether by staging a photograph of two zebras on a snowy mountaintop or transforming a contemporary art museum into an arena of screaming people, her irreverent installations, sculptures, performances, and photographs bring together playful and unexpected elements from our everyday world that present the inconceivable as real. In her new work, How I Roll, a twin-engine plane, supported by vertical steel posts at the wing tips, rotates in the center of Doris C. Freedman Plaza. This subversion of the expected—the juxtaposition of a busy Midtown Manhattan plaza with a Piper Seneca slowly rotating on its own axis—is central to Pivi’s practice. A joyful expression of creative imagination, the work captures the artist’s fascination with highly engineered machines that are also capable of poetic transformation into captivating, artistic objects. How I Roll is her first public art project in the United States.
More information: www.publicartfund.org