PUBLIC ART ACROSS TIME, SPACE AND SCALE

The photo mosaic of modern public artworks depicted from select global cities showcases varying strands of creativity and contexts, spread across cultures and geographies.

- Rajnish Wattas

KING LEAR

ARTIST: J. Seward Johnson Jr, Chicago (2007) Temporary installation at Magnificent Mile, Chicago.

They engage, correspond, and respond to the socio-cultural milieus of their settings—appropriate to the time, space, and scale. The showcased works of artists ranging from the iconic to the not so famous, in spaces big and small, in materials raw and glossy, built for permanence or transience. Public artworks of legendry names such as Pablo Picasso (the only one of its kind in Chicago), Anish Kapur and Alexander Calder among others, located in the vibrant metropolises of New York, Chicago, Hartford, Boston, and London or in a sleepy hamlet of Switzerland, are included.

Liberated from the confines of museums or similar such repositories, displayed out in the open and staged in public domains accessible to all, these works express, reflect, engage or provoke ideas—ranging from the sublime to the raw, permanent to the ephemeral. They explore traditional as well as new mediums, such as temporary installations and interactive/digital public artworks. They introduce social ideas but leave room for the public to come to their own conclusions.

An exhibition of 60 such works was displayed in Chandigarh recently—a city itself conceived as an extended urban art form by its iconic artist-architect-planner Le Corbusier. The exhibition aimed at stirring a dialogue on the symbiosis between art, architecture, and public space. This would then deepen further the ‘citizen-city’ connect, lived through the everyday experience of art in the public domain.

BALLOON FLOWER (RED)