Coffee and a strange sight~

What’s with the pink tree on the High Line and 10th Avenue?

A 25-foot-tall fluorescent pink tree, a sculpture by the Swiss conceptual artist Pamela Rosenkranz, will land on New York’s High Line next April like a synthetic being, rising amid its budding-green brethren where the elevated park bridges 10th Avenue at West 30th Street. Reading as a tree (but obviously artificial), this rendition will have visceral qualities, with branches tapering into blood vessels and roots reaching over the earthen-clad plinth as though poised for flight.

“The whole tree might remind us of an organ,” said the artist, 43, who is based in Zurich and is the winner of the third High Line Plinth commission, a rotating program for monumental public artworks on view for 18 months at a time. (The first artists were Simone Leigh and Sam Durant.) Rosenkranz’s work, “Old Tree,” was selected from 80 proposals solicited from artists in 40 countries, nominated by international advisers and posted on the High Line’s website in 2020 for public feedback.

Digitally merging scans of actual trees with those of human circulatory systems and muscles, Rosenkranz fabricated an armature in metal on which she is sculpting layers of tactile polymer, tinted with pigments of vivid reddish pinks. “This color has a history of being quite attractive,” she said in an interview, “but I’m looking for a dissonance, something that also awakes or repulses.”

She was inspired by Louise Bourgeois’s monumental sculptures of spiders when designing her tree’s animated roots that appear to be scrambling from the plinth. “There’s a bit of a humoristic aspect,” she said, “as if the tree would like to leave its planter.”

From a NYT Article from Hilarie M. Sheets

Photos: dievca NYC High Line 04/2023