Existing comment:
Site-Specific Sculpture:
Albert Paley's recent works, ranging from gates to his site-specific abstract sculptures, are individually distinctive but fully integrated into their architectural contexts. Paley has emphasized that just as his art related to the surrounding architecture, the architecture also relates to and engaged with his work. As he has stated, "no matter how good the sculpture is, if it doesn't amplify the space, it doesn't function."
Over the course of a career that spans almost four decades, Paley has completed more than 50 major sculptures, each created for a specific setting. His latest largest-scale project was a series of 13 ambitious sculptures sited along the median of a 15-block section of Park Avenue in New York City during the summer of 2013. With this new body of work, Paley celebrated the energy of the city by fusing the characteristics of delicacy, complexity, and monumentality in his own work with the iconic urban architecture that lines one of the best-known streets in the world.
With his exploration of and belief in the tradition and values of ornamentation and craftmanship, Paley challenges the modernist principles that form should follow function, and that simplicity is paramount. Though intimately scaled jewelry, domestic furniture, and grand sculpture, his work seeks to celebrate and enhance personal experience in a vast range of environments. Paley's objects help focus the human qualities and scale of whatever spaces they inhabit, while referencing the aesthetic traditions of ornamentation and the innovations of postmodern designs. |