Commissioned by Brookfield Properties, the large-scale artworks will be unveiled in June.
(Bloomberg) — About a month before his 39-foot-wide mosaic is set to be unveiled inside a lobby at Two Manhattan West, an office tower across from New York’s Moynihan Train Hall, the artist Christopher Wool is feeling a little jumpy.
“I have no idea if it will be successful or not,” he says of the abstract work, which is made from glass and stone. “I told them yesterday, ‘if we take the scaffolding down but the piece doesn’t look good, you’re going to put the scaffold back up.’” Representatives from Brookfield Properties, which developed the property and commissioned the work, “laughed,” Wool deadpans, “but I think they were crying on the inside.”
Wool’s work will be joined by a commission from the sculptor Charles Ray, often considered an artist’s artist who broke into the mainstream with a highly regarded retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year. Ray’s work, Adam and Eve, will stand in front of Two Manhattan West on the corner of 9th Avenue and 31st Street. The piece’s two stainless-steel figures depict a nearly nine-foot-high standing, elderly man, and a seated woman of a similar age.
Commissioning Two Stars
Brookfield first approached Ray, who wrote a lengthy proposal for the artwork, meditating on age, death, myth and place. “Does Eve sit on the stump of the tree of knowledge or everlasting life? Have they returned to a fallen garden? Where are they? Who are they?” he wrote in a 2020 proposal letter.
For Wool’s part, the opportunity of making a massive commissioned artwork was too interesting to pass up. Most famous for his word paintings, which can sell for tens of millions of dollars, Wool has done very few large-scale pieces (this will be his largest ever) and even fewer commissions. “Doing a commission is slightly different from making a painting in a studio,” he says. “I had to think of a wider audience, and how it would look as a public thing. That’s not a normal concern.” His solution, he says, was not to try painting at all and instead turn to mosaic, which for him is a new medium. “I’ve used silkscreens and photographic imagery to make paintings,” he says. “So I understand making a dot matrix of making a picture, in and in a simple way a mosaic fits that very well: You’re using small pieces to create a bigger picture.”
Creating the Mosaic
Wool came up with several abstract images and then approached Miotto Mosaic Art Studios in New York. “It turns out that there are two really advanced mosaic makers in the world,” Wool explains. “One in Munich, and one in New York.” The team at the studio, he says, walked him through what would be feasible in a mosaic format, and they settled on a final image to present to Brookfield, who eagerly gave it the green light.
Now the work is nearly ready for its unveiling, which will take place on June 5.
Wool says that he’d discussed the project with his gallerist under the rubric of having created a piece of public art, “but in his mind it’s a corporate project,” he says. While agreeing on principle—after all, it’s in the lobby of an office building—Wool points out that the piece will be visible from a variety of public spaces, including as people leave the Moynihan station. “I was thinking about it as a piece of public art for Manhattan,” Wool says. “I’ve titled it Crosstown Traffic, and I think that part of the city, like a lot of central Manhattan, is hectic. I thought this image embodied some of that in spirit.”
Even though the work has yet to make its debut, Wool is, despite some trepidation, already pleased with the project. “It’s going to be there for a while—hopefully a long while,” he says. “Artists don’t get that opportunity so often.”
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