August 8, 2012
By RANDY KENNEDY
Gagosian GalleryThe installation of Mr. Chamberlain’s works outside the Seagram Building.
The plaza of the Seagram Building, which has been the stage for a procession of supersized contemporary art installations over the last few years, is about to sprout a forest of tinfoil tentacles. Or at least a bunch of towering, sinuous things that appear to be made of foil, created by the sculptor John Chamberlain, who died in 2011.
Beginning Friday and continuing through Nov. 16, the plaza will host four sculptures made by Mr. Chamberlain from a body of work that detoured from his signature material – scrap automotive metal – and toward a much more pliable material. In the mid-1970s he began to make small pieces by twisting and shaping household foil into forms that resembled renegade ropes or elephant trunks or anemone tentacles. The pieces were then enlarged into full-scale sculptures made out of industrial aluminum, one of which – a kind of upside-down, dromedary version – was featured in the middle of the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda during the museum’s retrospective of Mr. Chamberlain’s work this year.
The Seagram exhibition, presented by the Gagosian Gallery, will include pieces rising as high as 15 feet, made from 2008 to 2010 in silver, green and copper-colored aluminum.
The display will not be the first time the curves and sharp angles of Chamberlain works have been set against the rigid lines of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. In 1984, Mr. Chamberlain’s “American Tableau,” a monumental automotive-steel piece evoking a skyline or a line of pedestrians, was created for temporary display in the plaza.