Art World
Dan Graham Gets Metropolitan Museum Rooftop Commission for 2014
Graham will collaborate with Swiss landscape architect Günther Vogt.
Graham will collaborate with Swiss landscape architect Günther Vogt.
Benjamin Sutton ShareShare This Article
American conceptual artist Dan Graham has been awarded one of New York’s most prestigious art commissions for this year, and will create a mirrored, reflective, and transparent pavilion atop the Metropolitan Museum. For his commission, Graham will collaborate with Günther Vogt, the Swiss landscape architect, who will transform the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden with a pattern of hedge rows amid which a number of curved panes of two-way mirrored glass will be set. Graham has long been known for his glass pavilions, which he’s been creating since the 1980s.
“What Dan creates is a new form of quixotic landscape architecture that combines maker and community within a city environment,” the Met’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Sheena Wagstaff, said in a statement. “It is work that draws paradoxically on formal 18th-century Northern European gardens, while also referencing the glossy sleekness of corporate skyscrapers and the American suburban vernacular.”
Graham’s installation, which runs April 29-November 2, weather permitting, will be third highly-reflective installation to land on the Met’s roof in recent years, following Tomás Saraceno‘s Cloud City in 2012 to Jeff Koons’s balloon sculptures in 2008.