Marla Price, director of The Modern Art Museum, is pleased to announce the purchase of the monumental sculpture Conjoined by the New York-based artist Roxy Paine. Conjoined is a 40-foot-tall by 45-foot-wide stainless-steel sculpture of two trees whose branches cantilever in space to connect in midair. The sculpture is scheduled to be installed in March 2008 on the grounds opposite the reflecting pool of the Museum’s world-renowned building, designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Conjoined was recently on view in New York City as part of the exhibition “Roxy Paine: Three Works”, installed in Madison Square Park in May 2007 through February 27, 2008.
Paine’s longtime interest in the juxtaposition of nature and industrialization is evident in his extensive body of work. From his mushroom and plant fields to his artmaking machines and large-scale metal trees, he continues to explore the relationship of the natural to the unnatural. Through work that meshes the organic with the manufactured, Paine questions our position between the man-made world we control and nature’s world we cannot.
Following the erection of Richard Serra’s Vortex in 2002, Conjoined is the second major work of outdoor sculpture to be placed on the Museum’s eleven-acre site. According to the Museum’s chief curator, Michael Auping, “It has always been our plan to place an important work on the northeast corner of the pond across from the gallery pavilions. It took some time to find the right work, one that fits into the architect’s idea of natural theater, or ‘an arbor for art,’ as he called it, but that also stands out as a piece of sculpture, a man-made invention. The surreal coming-together of these two stainless-steel trees seemed to us to be a perfect combination of nature and culture.”
Roxy Paine was born in 1966 in New York and studied at both the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico and the Pratt Institute in New York. Since 1990, his work has been internationally exhibited and is included in major collections such as the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn and Treadwell, New York.
