NEW YORK, NY.- B. Wurtz’s Kitchen Trees – the artist’s first public art exhibition in his nearly 50-year career – is now on view, featuring five new sculptures that bring a splash of whimsy to City Hall Park and invite a renewed outlook on the ordinary.
Composed of everyday kitchen items, the arboreal sculptures feature brightly colored stacked colanders that form bulbous trunks, and pots and pans that dangle from the ends of “branches” bearing plastic fruits and vegetables. The works are inspired by the park’s historic fountain – and at over 18 feet in height are the largest sculptures Wurtz has ever created!
“With my sculptures, you can see how they’re made. Everything is obvious, nothing is hidden," Wurtz told T Magazine in a recent conversation about his favorite thing.
B. Wurtz’ arrangements are characteristically made from simple utilitarian objects, such as plastic bags, tin cans, shoelaces, food carriers, and pieces of wood, wire, and more, that form small-scale or delicate three-dimensional works. They are meticulously assembled to suggest a composition that hovers between precarious fragility and formal monumentality. Expanding this practice for Kitchen Trees, Wurtz will stack colanders to create colorful, bulbous trunks. From these, upside-down pots and pans will sprout to form branches that extend to hold plastic fruits and vegetables. Subtle yet playful, Wurtz’ sculptures suggest a redemptive or celebratory function for everyday objects: by juxtaposing utilitarian materials and placing them in a fine art context, the artist creates a new formal relationship and presents them with a renewed sense of value. At the same time, by giving new life to disused or reclaimed materials, Wurtz highlights his concern for recycling and the reuse of discarded waste.
“Wurtz is so refreshing because his work transforms everyday objects into fantastical sculptures that showcase the beauty in our everyday surroundings,” says Public Art Fund Associate Curator Daniel S. Palmer. “Kitchen Trees is an especially exciting moment for the artist because it is the first time that he’ll bring that ethos outside of the gallery walls to interact with the urban landscape and the diverse audiences that visit City Hall Park.”
Wurtz found inspiration in City Hall Park’s flora and historic fountain, designed by Jacob Wrey Mould and erected in 1871. Reflecting the fountain’s Victorian forms, four of the works have been installed around the cardinal points of this central feature of the park, with the sculptures’ branches evoking the spray of its jets and the stacked colanders echoing the four antiquarian candelabra lights. Another single sculpture stands at the south entrance to the park connecting the artworks to the diverse groves that populate this area of the park. Each tree-like sculpture features colanders of a different color, including blue, red, orange, green, and yellow, and rise up to 17 feet high and span up to 14 feet in diameter. This marks a significant expansion in Wurtz’ practice, which has typically included small-scale artworks for galleries or museum spaces.
“His practice has long been rooted in the idea of creating small-scale, fragile sculptures with a meticulous equilibrium. In them, I began to see the potential for works with a monumental quality – as if he were creating proposals for public sculptures all along. The process of translating small to large has been revelatory and allowed Wurtz to expand his almost alchemical way of working to share new beauty with the public,” said Palmer.
Wurtz’ practice grows out of the Conceptual and Pop Art movements, while also evoking Marcel Duchamp, Claes Oldenburg, and Alexander Calder. His 50-year career has been marked by a balance between aesthetics, form, and subject, highlighting the ways in which found material and conceptual artistic intention can align. His 1973 text-drawing Three Important Things, which numbered in order ‘sleeping,’ ‘eating,’ and ‘keeping warm,’ has served as a manifesto for the rest of his work and a declaration of his artmaking and style. By bringing work of monumental scale to the public realm for the first time, Wurtz’ Kitchen Trees represents a significant moment in the artist’s oeuvre that will offer a joyfully unexpected experience through the arrangement of quotidian things.
B. Wurtz: Kitchen Trees is curated by Public Art Fund Associate Curator Daniel S. Palmer.
B. Wurtz (B. 1948 in Pasadena, California) lives and works in New York. In 2015, he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. In 2016, the exhibition traveled to La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain. He has had additional solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany (2015); White Flag Projects, St. Louis, Missouri (2012); and Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago (2000). His work has been included in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois (2011); and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France (2009)
