Public Sculpture Steps Up

Over the past 15 years public sculpture has become one of contemporary art’s more exciting areas of endeavor and certainly its most dramatically improved one.

Mark Wallinger’s 1999 “Ecce Homo,” a life-size figure of Jesus in London

The Kapoor Bean

reflective surfaces into an enveloping experience that is both humorous and almost sublime

No one has been more important to the revival of public art than Jeff Koons

“Puppy” (1992) by Jeff Koons at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain

“Puppy” was intensely loveable, triggering a laugh-out-loud visual delight that expanded your sense of the human capacity for joy

Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc”

Richard Serra’s sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007.

prim yet erotic “Balloon Dog” sculptures

you are drawn toward them by their familiarity only to realize that they are unprecedented

“Cracked Egg (Magenta),”

Koons’s “Rabbit” was part of the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade in 2007

see ourselves in his alluring reflective surfaces