celestial visions on the met roof - all in one solar street light

Last week, when I saw the first image ever made up of black holes --
Wrongly referred to as a "photo", in fact, it is a digital composition that is spliced by the observations of eight telescopes --
I can hardly see it.
The oversized mass gap in the center of the Messier 87 galaxy is about as large as our solar system, with a mass of more than 6 billion times that of the sun and no light escaping from it.
What this picture shows is the event horizon surrounding it, the aura of a burning flame;
But the aura looks blurry, and in a few seconds it is re-used for all sorts of poor digital jokes.
Try to capture the infinite space, and that's what you get: fall from grace and fall from heaven to earth.
Taking the planet to an unfathomable place of human scale is one of the career of Polish Alicja Kwade
German artists awarded the Metropolitan Museum of Art Conto roof garden a Commission this summer.
Precise, spare, elegant (
Sometimes indoors. designer-pleasing fault)
Her sculpture uses optical techniques and careful positioning to evoke our instability and unknowability in the world.
Two large sculptures, made of colored steel and precious marble, she showed here, indicate that a planetary system was taken to Manhattan and floating on the skyline.
Simpler and more striking than her earlier work was that they constituted the strongest intervention in the metropolitan roof since Dan Graham in 2014.
Another artist related to the mystery of perception
A reflection booth is installed here. Ms.
Kwade, born in 1979, has won international attention over the past few years with her cunning appearanceand-look-
Using double sculpture again
A mirror, carefully curved copper, in one case, a pair of almost identical Nissan hatchbacks.
At the Metropolitan Museum, she confined herself to a narrower range.
The two sculptures consist of three to five rectangular powder frames.
The coated black steel placed at different angles, welded together at the bottom, rises to a staggered height.
On these steel racks, there are four or five colored marble spheres, some sitting on the ground, others balancing on the top of the frame, and some hanging in the air, which is incredible.
These works are called "ParaPivot I" and "ParaPivot II" and they stand independently in the center of the roof garden, inviting you to walk between them and bypass them. (
Alas, you cannot walk within the frame;
Although Met has done its best to calm firefighters down, the museum believes it is too dangerous to bring visitors close to it, especially with summer cocktails on hand. )
Steel racks act as photo frames for Fifth Avenue, Central Park West, especially the 59 th Street skyline
Used to be a street without self
Over the past few years, with the explosive growth of ultra-thin speculators apartments, respect for Plutarch will continue to exist.
From one point of view, the three rectangles of the smaller "ParaPivot II" become brackets around the apartment building in the Upper West Side of the El Dorado.
The rectangle of the larger "ParaPivot I", especially when you look south, cut the Midtown into pieces of architectural appreciation or financial commentary according to your point of view (
Politics and optics).
Each of the nine areas balanced on these frameworks
Once considered the number of planets in the solar system, before Pluto was downgraded in 2006 --
Marble is mined from different locations in Europe, Asia and South America.
A milky white ball sitting on the floor came from Carrara, Italy;
The gray sphere above one of the frames is from India.
There is a red sphere, made of Portuguese marble, which can recall the gas Jupiter, and a sphere with a blue color.
The white hue of Uranus.
The weight of each is from half a ton to one and a half tons.
Kwade doubles her planetary balancing action by squeezing two balls between two frames.
A green Marcy quartz rock sphere from Finland, sandwiched between two steel bars, was cloudy with white threads, recalling the "blue marble" photo of our planet taken in 1972.
These suspension tips are pulled apart along with the brackets hidden inside the steel frame, as close to the MS
Kwade came here to learn active optical techniques, but also limited her previous sculptures.
At the last Venice Biennale in 2017, her work "WeltenLinie" showed stone and bronze replicas on both sides of a powder-like --
Frame of coated steel;
Some frames are empty, while others support mirroring. (
This provides some sitcom entertainment;
You can see the jet.
The backward Biennale visitors stepped back from the mirror in the chaos as they were sure there was nothing there. )
At the Chelsea 303 Gallery while exhibiting her artwork at the same time, a new sculpture consists of 11 boulders of different colors and shapes with mirrors inserted in the middle, so from a different perspective, the Stones seem to turn into a funky mix of concrete and sandstone, marble and crystal.
I find that works like this are more beautiful than esoteric works, and the material of the lady is elegant
Mirror sculpture of Kwade,
Who's beautiful stone will inspire any plan six
Kitchen decoration-picturecan short-
Around the complexity of the artist's claim.
But in the metropolis, the simplicity of these two "short bridges", and their perfect combination with the skyline and Central Park, make the synthesis of sculpture, city and universe even more noticeable, when you circle them, it will register in and out.
The frame is like the quotation marks of the skyline, and the marble ball is like an exclamation mark.
However, they are also the signifier of celestial bodies, made of stones mined from this planet, but represent others, perhaps from this solar system, perhaps from millions of light --years away. I found in Ms.
The two sculptures of Kwade are examples of how we accept and appreciate the unfathomable nature of things, rather than losing their scale in the constant proliferation of the structure and memes of modern society.
Seeing the black hole break instantly carved into the stupidity of social networks --
Shrink and graft to GIFs and gross in cats-out gags —
Is to realize how much our ability to be curious, surprised and grateful has dropped since the publication of Blue Marble. Re-
I want to say now that building these abilities is an urgent function of art.
Kwade presents us with the precision of an astronomers and the beauty of a sculptor.
Alicja Kwade: October.
27 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-535-The Metropolitan Museum 7710org.
Alicja Kwade: Held on May 18 at Gallery 303, 555 West 21 St, Chelsea; 212-255-
1121,303 gallery. com.