New Museum Rotates Facade Sculpture To Isa Genzken's Rose II

This Saturday, October 30, 2010, the New Museum will begin preparations for a new façade sculpture. Isa Genzken's Rose II (2008) will be the second work presented on the Museum's second-floor ledge, which was designed to host a rotating program of sculpture installations. Isa Genzken has a distinguished history in public sculpture, with works in public and private venues throughout Europe. Standing twenty-eight feet in height, Rose II (2008) will be Isa Genzken's first public sculpture in New York. The sculpture is scheduled to be fully installed by the end of November. The façade Sculpture Program is made possible by an endowment established by The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust.

In December 2007, Ugo Rondinone's Hell, Yes! (2001) was unveiled on the façade to celebrate the opening of the New Museum's first freestanding building at 235 Bowery. The sculpture quickly became such a pivotal part of the Museum's new identity that it was acquired and donated to the New Museum by several museum trustees. The New Museum plans to reinstall Hell, Yes! in another location soon.

Isa Genzken (b. 1948, Germany) is one of Germany's most renowned artists. Over her more than forty-year career, Genzken has produced an astonishingly varied body of work that includes photographic assemblages, three-dimensional objects, installations, and monumental, site-specific sculpture. Rose II was originally created in 1993 and was reprised in 2008. It is less a departure than a culmination of a practice that takes on grand themes like the way we perceive and define objects and images through our senses; the implications of scale; and the integration of architecture, nature, and mass culture. Although Genzken is a longtime resident of Berlin, she has had a forty-year love affair with New York City, which she first visited as a student. Looking back on that experience, she has commented, "To me, New York had a direct link with sculpture- (It) is a city of incredible stability and solidity." The installation of Rose II can be seen as a floral tribute to a place she continues to love.