Artworks
- Sculpture
- American
- Will Ryman
- American, born 1969
- Bird
- 2012
- Actual and fabricated steel nails, painted steel
- 12 x 12 x 14 feet
- This sculpture is made with fifty-five hundred actual and fabricated nails in the shape of a bird. The work weighs five tons, and rests upon a nest of ninety thousand nails. Through this work, Ryman changes the meaning of the nail, which is traditionally used to connect materials and build structures. By dramatically altering its scale and using it in excessive quantities, Ryman blurs the relationship between abstraction and realism. As the viewer rotates around the sculpture, the piece transitions from the shape of a bird to a nonrepresentational sculpture.
Will Ryman is known for creating monumental public sculptures that transform and enliven the daily urban experience. In these works, Ryman represents natural subjects at many times their normal size and installs them in active city streets. ("Bird" was installed in the Flatiron Plaza, New York, NY March 24th - April 21st, 2013.) Viewed in this context, the colorful and eye-catching figures are fantastical, evoking a sense of childlike awe over things normally taken for granted. Ryman also creates indoor installations, manipulating the sizes of various objects to suggest their relative importance to the artist or viewer; a beer can, for instance, may be as large as a lamp. He is the son of minimalist painter Robert Ryman, and his style recalls the Pop Art of Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg, the latter also known for creating large-scale, good-humored public works. - Gift of Helen Kent-Nicoll and Edward J. Nicoll
- 2016.5
- Exhibition History
- Provenance
- Artist's studio made arrangements to ship to the museum from the fabricator in Connecticut.
