Before springtime hits New York this year, some impressive new blooms have appeared in Central Park thanks to a sculptural installation by the German artist Isa Genzken organized by the Public Art Fund.
‘Two Orchids’, a pair of 9 and 10-meter sculptures of white flowers made from cast aluminum and stainless steel in 2015 and were first shown at last year’s Venice Biennale are on view at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza near the park’s southeast entrance from March 1 to August 21.
“While the trees are still bare [and] just before the park begins to blossom, Genzken’s flowering sculpture will greet the city as a herald of spring,” the director of The Public Art Fund, Nicholas Baume, told The Art Newspaper.
The orchid sculptures, as tall as three-story buildings, appear “almost cartoon-like in this larger-than-life, doubled version.
For Genzken the decorative neutrality of the orchid makes it the quintessential flower of our period - ubiquitous, porous to meaning, and global,” Baume said.
The orchids join Genzken’s other well-known floral work, the 11-meter-tall Rose II (2007), which was suspended like a city-sized corsage on the New Museum’s facade from 2010 to 2013 and is now installed in Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden in New York.
Genzken, who lives in Berlin, has worked in painting, drawing, photography, film and other media, as well as sculpture. She is considered one of the most influential artists of the past four decades.
While recognized for the variance and multiplicity within her work, it is sculpture that has always remained at the heart of her practice.
