Richard Woods has wrapped up Lever House in Victorian splendor (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through January 30 (extended into February)
Admission: free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
flickr slideshow
Last year, British artist Richard Woods papered two City Hall security booths in a white-and-redbrick design that made them look like they were toys; he also covered a City Hall lobby door in a graphic representation of itself, turning it into a cartoon in an otherwise formal lobby. Now Woods has taken over the inside and outside of Lever House, designing all of the posts and Noguchi benches in a series of nine decorative patterns inspired by the legacy of nineteenth-century socialist designer William Morris. Using woodblock prints, Woods packages up Gordon Bunshaft’s minimalist building in Victorian splendor, even adding two aluminum “rugs” that people can walk on in the lobby. Lever House comes alive with colorful flowers, leaves, and birds as well as black-and-white geometric shapes, repeated over and over again. The two floor pieces take Carl Andre to the next level, almost too captivating to walk on, but it’s rather thrilling to trod upon them as you watch others passing by on the concrete and asphalt of Park Ave. By titling the site-specific installation “Port Sunlight,” Woods reaches into the past of both Lever House and his childhood. When he was a small boy, the first art institution he ever visited was the Lady Lever Gallery, which was in the model village known as Port Sunlight, built by William Lever as a home for the employees of his soap factory, where their first cleaning product was Sunlight. And so Woods’s “Port Sunlight” offers a sweet respite in the middle of swirling Midtown Manhattan