Aaron Curry’s “Big Pink” and “Yellow Bird Boy” are among ten works in City Hall Park that comment on the history of public statuary (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
City Hall Park
Intersection of Broadway, Chambers St., Centre St., and Park Row
Through December 3
Admission: free
www.publicartfund.org/statuesque
twi-ny slideshow tour
The Public Art Fund’s current exhibition in City Hall Park, “Statuesque,” consists of ten large-scale sculptures by six international artists that look at the tradition of figurative sculpture in different ways. “We’re sort of working in an uncanny oscillation between likeness and abstraction, sort of living history in reverse,” Californian Matthew Monahan said at a Public Art Fund talk about the exhibit in March, “so that sculpture’s walking backwards from abstraction back into a sort of lovely mortal skin.” Monahan’s “Nation Builder” plays off the military statue, as a man carrying a huge weapon and missing the bottom of his legs stands atop two disjointed cubes. English artist Thomas Houseago’s “Red Man” and “Lumpy Figure” are a far cry from classical Greek sculpture, eschewing smoothness for, well, lumpiness, while Polish sculptor Pawel Althamer’s aluminum “Sylwia” strikes an erotic pose lying across the grass. Texas native Aaron Curry creates brightly colored abstract figures reminiscent of Alexander Calder in such pieces as “Big Pink” and “Yellow Bird Boy,” while Pakistani Huma Babha takes on the classic pose of a famous man sitting proudly in a chair in “The Orientalist,” creating a decrepit bronze Dorian Gray character. And London’s Rebecca Warren contributes an out-of-proportion comic-book-like figure in “Large Concretised Monument to the Twentieth Century,” which actually stands guard at one of the park’s entrances, warning everyone who enters that they are not going to be seeing the usual kind of honorary monuments that can be found in parks. The exhibit also includes a cell phone audio tour, with the specific numbers on the green sign accompanying each work.