Park Tower Group, along with artist Jonathan Prince and Christie’s New York, are pleased to announce the debut of Prince’s “Shatter Series” at Christie’s Sculpture Garden at 535 Madison Avenue at 54th Street. Three monumental works will be on view September 10 through November 10 in the Garden, located in the public courtyard of the Class A office tower, which features large-scale sculpture exhibitions offered for sale by Christie’s New York. This is Prince’s second solo exhibition since 2012 at the space.
Prince, a New York and Massachusetts-based artist, is best known for large-scale sculpture fabricated from Cor-Ten, stainless steel and granite. The “Shatter Series,” fabricated in his Berkshires studio from Cor-Ten and mirror-polished stainless steel, contends with surpassing the limitations of the physical constraints of materiality while interrogating notions of perceived beauty, chaos and strength.
“We are so pleased to present this new series by Jonathan in the outdoor plaza,” said Marian Klein, president of Park Tower Group, which built, owns and continues to manage 535 Madison Avenue. “World-class public art is an integral element to 535 Madison’s DNA and the ‘Shatter Series’ is our latest offering curated by Christie’s; we’re thrilled to be debuting new work by such an exciting artist.”
Born in 2009 of a unique partnership between Christie’s, the world’s leading art business, and Park Tower Group, a major real-estate developer known for architecturally outstanding developments, this exhibition space showcases major artwork curated by Christie’s to the public in an ongoing series of sales exhibitions, both on the outdoor plaza and inside the recently modernized tower lobby. While Christie’s is not changing its approach to the primary market and does not represent individual artists, the Sculpture Garden has previously exhibited works by François-Xavier Lalanne and Claude Lalanne, Robert Indiana, Ronald Bladen, Jonathan Prince, and Alexander Calder.
“Christie’s is delighted to invite Jonathan Prince to exhibit his new “Shatter Series” at our Christie’s Sculpture Garden this fall. Shatter Series is a natural evolution of Prince’s sculptural work exploring the physical nature of material and human behavior. These exhibitions at 535 Madison Avenue are an excellent opportunity for us, as the world’s leading art business, to expose artists like Jonathan Prince to the public in an exciting new way,” said Vivian Brodie, Post-War and Contemporary Art Specialist, Christie’s.
Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of nature, science and anatomy, Prince examines perceived material capability and how materials might appear if they behaved in surprising ways. The Cor-Ten steel outer surfaces in “Shatter I, II” and “III” represent Euclidean geometric forms, suggesting mathematical perfection to the exterior, while the interior surfaces reflect breaks, tears and scars — metaphors for the human experience and where the real beauty in all of us can be found.
“I’m constantly exploring the properties of fluidity and movement created with static heavy immobile materials like steel and granite,” Prince explains. “There is a poetry within the juxtaposition of fragility and strength in the materials and forms that I work with, I see this physical duality as a parallel to the chaos of the human condition.”
