Antony Gormley Unveils Sprawling Aluminum Sculpture in NYC

Earlier this year, South Korean boyband BTS announced it would launch CONNECT, BTS, a global art initiative that would give 22 contemporary artists in five international cities the opportunity to launch large-scale installations and exhibitions surrounding the band’s philosophy of “diversity, love, and care for the periphery.” Today, acclaimed British artist Antony Gormley revealed his massive New York Clearing sculpture at New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 3.

Made up of more than 11 miles of square aluminum tubing, the structure rises to a height of almost 50 feet and “counters the grid of modernism and the city” with its swooping, fluid form. “This is the first time that I have attempted to make Clearing without architectural support,” Gormley said. “I am enormously excited about the opportunity of making this energy field in conversation with Manhattan across the waters of the East River. It can be seen as an evocation of human connectivity, a materialisation of the energy of the people that view it and the people that made it.”

CONNECT, BTS kicked off with London’s Serpentine Galleries’ presentation of Jacob Kudsk Steensen’s reimagined growth forest. Exhibitions in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Seoul followed. New York is the fifth and last city the art initiative will arrive in.

Take a closer look at New York Clearing in the gallery above and head over to Brooklyn Bridge Park to see it in person.

Elsewhere in art, JR has completed a massive The Chronicles of New York mural in New York City’s Domino Park.