British artist Cornelia Parker has been selected to create the 2016 roof garden installation at the Met, announced Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cornelia Parker's site-specific installation for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden will be on view from May through October 2016. It will be the fourth in a series of site-specific commissions for the outdoor space.
Cornelia Parker. Image courtesy of Frith Street Gallery & www.bloginity.com.
Mr. Campbell said, "The Roof Garden should always be a space that makes us think beyond its spectacular views. It is a unique source of inspiration for the artists who create site-specific works there, and I am excited to see what Cornelia Parker will create. Her work is remarkable for the ways in which she looks at things we think of as familiar, and up-ends our perception of them in the process."
Sheena Wagstaff, the Museum's Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art said, "In her large-scale installations, Cornelia opens our eyes to the special qualities—and sometimes darker significance—of familiar places and things we tend to overlook. Her insatiable curiosity often leads her into difficult cultural territories, but the results are never less than provocative and surprising. We look forward to sharing Cornelia's site-specific installation and its unique take on an aspect of American architecture when the Roof Garden opens next spring.”
Cornelia Parker
Cornelia Parker (born 1956, Cheshire, England) studied at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design (1974-1975) and Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1975-1978), and received her MFA from Reading University in 1982. Parker lives and works in London. She is well-known for her large-scale, often site-specific, installations.
Parker's engagement with the fragility of existence and the transformation of materials is exemplified in two works: Cold Dark Matter (1991), a cartoon-like reconstruction of an exploded army shed, and Heart of Darkness (2004), the formal arrangement of charred remains from a forest fire.
Parker has had numerous solo exhibitions, including a 2015 retrospective at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, The Whitechapel Gallery, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Serpentine Gallery. International exhibitions include the 2014 Gwangju Biennale, 2013 Venice Biennale, and 2008 Sydney Biennale. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997.
She is a Royal Academician and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010. Parker's work is included in many private and public collections around the world including the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, de Young Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Yale Center for British Art.
Parker is featured in Season 3 of the Metropolitan Museum's online series The Artist Project. The episode can be viewed here.
About The Roof Garden Commission
In 2013, the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art initiated a new series of site-specific commissions on The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. So far, the outdoor exhibition space has featured work by artists Imran Qureshi (2013), Dan Graham (2014), and Pierre Huyghe (on view through November 1, 2015).
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden opened to the public in 1987. From 1998 to 2011, a series of single-artist installations were presented. The line up included Ellsworth Kelly (1998), Magdalena Abakanowicz (1999), David Smith (2000), Joel Shapiro (2001), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (2002), Roy Lichtenstein (2003), Andy Goldsworthy (2004), Sol LeWitt (2005), Cai Guo-Qiang (2006), Frank Stella (2007), Jeff Koons (2008), Roxy Paine (2009), Doug + Mike Starn (2010), Anthony Caro (2011), and Tomás Saraceno (2012).
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BASIC FACTS: Cornelia Parker's installation will be on view at the Met's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden from May through October 2016. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book to be published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press
The Roof Garden exhibition will be overseen by Sheena Wagstaff, and organized by Beatrice Galilee, Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design in the Met's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is located at 1000 5th Ave, New York, NY 10028. www.metmuseum.org.
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