Koons Sculpture Comes to 30 Rock

June 18, 2014  |   Events,   Feature,   World
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The rocking horse on display at New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza is a 37-foot-high public art installation composed of 50,000 flowering plants and is the work of American artist Jeff Koons.

For his floral sculpture, Koons proceeded from two different rocker motifs, a pony and a dinosaur, whose heads he cut in half and then reassembled. Since the halves do not coincide, gaps are formed at certain places which open the sculpture out and transform it into an architecture that offers refuges. A disassembled and differently reassembled figure that simultaneously looks forward and to the side, Split-Rocker relates to the Cubism of Picasso while at the same time turning it in an entirely new direction. As a floral outdoor sculpture, the piece also continues the tradition of Baroque garden art and the topiary gardening still seen today in popular amusement parks.
For his floral sculpture, Koons proceeded from two different rocker motifs, a pony and a dinosaur, whose heads he cut in half and then reassembled. Since the halves do not coincide, gaps are formed at certain places which open the sculpture out and transform it into an architecture that offers refuges. A disassembled and differently reassembled figure that simultaneously looks forward and to the side, Split-Rocker relates to the Cubism of Picasso while at the same time turning it in an entirely new direction. As a floral outdoor sculpture, the piece also continues the tradition of Baroque garden art and the topiary gardening still seen today in popular amusement parks.

Titled “Split-Rocker,” the work was first exhibited in France in 2000 and has been on display at a private museum in Maryland since 2013, according to Rockefeller Center’s website.

Koons produced just two editions of the sculpture. He owns the one installed in Rockefeller Center; the other is in the collection of Glenstone, the private museum in Potomac, Md., owned by Mitchell P. Rales, the industrialist, and his wife, Emily. Larry Gagosian, the New York dealer who represents Jeff Koons is paying for the Rockefeller Center installation.

The public artwork’s debut in New York coincides with a retrospective of Jeff Koon’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which runs from June 27 to October 19.

With the combination of pony and dinosaur, Split-Rocker embodies that confrontation of opposites that is also expressed in the notion of a "monstrous" , gigantic children's toy. Yet the artist chooses transitory flowers, of all things, as the material for a monument that promises duration.
With the combination of pony and dinosaur, Split-Rocker embodies that confrontation of opposites that is also expressed in the notion of a “monstrous” , gigantic children’s toy. Yet the artist chooses transitory flowers, of all things, as the material for a monument that promises duration.

The Whitney Museum describes Jeff Koons as an artist who has “pioneered new approaches to the readymade, tested the boundaries between advanced art and mass culture, challenged the limits of industrial fabrication, and transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market.”