MOUNTAINVILLE, NY.- Storm King Art Center, one of the world's most distinguished and best-loved sculpture parks, opens to the public on April 4 for its 2012 season. Located about an hour north of New York City, in the Hudson Valley, Storm King encompasses over 500 pristine acres of rolling hills, fields, and woodlands. These provide space for some 100 large-scale works by such preeminent artists as Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Andy Goldsworthy, Maya Lin, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Serra, David Smith, and Ursula von Rydingsvard, among many others.
The highlight of Storm King's 2012 season is a special exhibition, titled Light and Landscape, which opens on May 12.
Light and Landscape
Storm King’s major 2012 exhibition, organized by Associate Curator Nora Lawrence, is devoted to work by artists who use a variety of strategies to engage with light as a central component of their work. Some twenty works by both emerging and established artists—ranging from sculpture to installation to video, and including examples created specifically for the Storm King landscape—will be installed across Storm King’s grounds and in its historic and lightfilled Museum Building.
Some of the artists focus on the perceptual and aesthetic qualities of sunlight, while others take a conceptual approach that translates the energy of natural light into other art forms, including music. Together, their diverse works will encourage viewers to contemplate not only their natural surroundings and the visual effects of sunlight, but also its vast impact on our daily lives and ecosystem.
Highlights of artworks in Light and Landscape include Untitled (“...it was a mask, but the real face was identical to the false one.”) a 2009/10 glass sculpture by Roni Horn; the 1972 film Landscape for Fire, by Anthony McCall; Lunar, 2011, a sculpture by Spencer Finch; and, created specially for Storm King, Peter Coffin’s Untitled (Bees Making Honey), comprising an apiary on the Storm King grounds at which a beekeeper will explain the role of sunlight in the production of honey, samples of which will also be given to visitors. Other artists represented in the exhibition include Anish Kapoor, William Lamson, Katie Paterson, Alyson Shotz, and Diana Thater, among others. The exhibition will be complemented by a variety of public programs.
Recent Acquisitions
David Smith’s iconic Cubi XXI (1964), which had been on loan to the Art Center, returns to Storm King for the 2012 season following its display in the exhibition David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In January 2012, this important work was gifted to the two institutions by the Lipman Family Foundation. Several other recent additions to the Storm King collection have also become visitor favorites. These include The Pietrarubbia Group: il fondamento, l’uso, il rapporto (1975–76), a major large-scale work by Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro that was a gift of long-time Storm King supporter Herbert Kayden, M.D., offered in memory of his late wife, Gabrielle Reem, M.D.; Wayside Drainpipe (1979), by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, a gift of Donald and Alfred Lippincott and the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation, Inc., and the colossal Three Legged Buddha (2007), by Chinese artist Zhang Huan, a gift of the artist and The Pace Gallery.
