The National Gallery of Art has commissioned American sculptor Roxy Paine to make a stainless steel Dendroid, as the artist calls his series of tree-like sculptures. Scheduled to be installed in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden this fall, this work will be the first by Paine to enter the collection, as well as the first contemporary sculpture to be installed in the Sculpture Garden in the nearly ten years since it opened.
“Graft” presents two fictive but distinct species of trees †one gnarled, twisting and irregular, the other smooth, elegant and rhythmic †joined to the same trunk. Among its rich associations, this sculpture evokes the persistent human desire to alter and recombine elements of nature, as well as the ever-present tension between order and chaos.
Paine’s first Dendroid, “Impostor” (1999), a 27-foot-tall sculpture, stands in a forest clearing at the Wanås Foundation in Knislinge, Sweden. Paine has since made 16 Dendroids, each unique and organized according to its own system. They are installed in sylvan settings, urban situations and landscaped urban parks. Trees have long been regarded a metaphor for human existence, and their forms evoke for Paine a range of natural and manmade systems †from neurons to river networks, from taxonomic diagrams to genealogical charts.
Paine divides his sculptural practice along three visually distinct tracks: in addition to the Dendroids, he makes meticulous representations of fields of plants and fungi modeled in polymer, which he calls Replicants. He also creates automated art-making machines that produce abstract paintings, sculptures and drawings. These seemingly disparate forms all share a common interest in the distinction between reality and artifice, the natural and the manmade environment, all raising questions about the limits of human control.
Paine was born in 1966 in New York and studied at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico and the Pratt Institute in New York. Since 1990, his work has been internationally exhibited and is included in major collections.
The Sculpture Garden is on the National Mall at Seventh Street and Constitution Avenue NW, in the block adjacent to the West Building. For information, www.nga.gov or 202- 737-4215.
