Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Secret Garden, the first in a series of online exhibitions featuring ambitious outdoor sculpture in imagined settings. At a time when we are bound indoors, we invite you to virtually experience the intersection of art and nature in summertime through the work of Ghada Amer, The Haas Brothers and Frank Stella.
The Haas Brothers’ Michelle O-Palma is emblematic of the artist duo’s humorous and out-of-this-world style that draws on their infinite imagination. Like most of their work, which seamlessly blends elements of art and design, the larger-than-life sculpture started as a drawing and then a miniature maquette sculpted by Nikolai Haas’ hands. Captured as a 3D scan so it could be translated into stone, Michelle O-Palma embodies the brothers’ collaborative nature as it bears the handiwork of the artists themselves and the marble artisans they worked closely with to realize the monumental artwork.
In Frank Stella’s Jasper’s Split Star, sculpture and architecture blend into a grandiose, monumental form. This artwork occupies and shapes space on a lofty scale, posing aesthetic questions about mass, composition and spatial relationships. The star form can be found throughout Stella’s output, as early as 1961. Looking back as it looks forward, this work presents a compelling continuation as much as an experimental departure.
Secret Garden explores two facets of Ghada Amer’s outdoor sculptural practice: her garden installations and her cast sculptures. A decade ago, Amer began translating the trademark line work characteristic of her embroidered paintings into three dimensions. Blue Bra Girls stands as a tribute to women who have faced adversity in light of their beliefs, titled after the 2011 Reuters photograph of a veiled woman whose bra was exposed whilst she was beaten during protests in Tahrir Square. Secret Garden also features a powerful example of Amer’s site-specific garden installations, Love Grave. The piece was first exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, commissioned by the institution in 2003, where the word LOVE was excavated emphatically six feet into the ground. Love Grave should be understood within the genre of war memorials as it constitutes one of Amer’s pointed responses to the “war on terror,” and a monument to love even during our darkest hours.
