The Met Roof Garden: Maelstrom
Cocktails at the Met Roof Garden
One of my favorite things about summer is all the great rooftops and outdoor venues for having a drink and enjoying the great weather. One of my perennial favorites is the roof garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It has a fantastic view over the park, and every year, a different sculpture installation to check out. If you haven’t been up there yet this year, it’s time to go! The rooftop has been open for over a month, and this year’s installation, Maelstrom by the Brooklyn-based artist Roxy Paine, is possibly my favorite out of all of the roof installations since I came to New York.
Paine is an American artist known for modern sculptures inspired by nature, and sometimes fusing natural inspirations with the omnipresence of human industrial society. Maelstrom is a 130 foot long by 45 foot wide stainless steel creation that straddles the line between trees and neurons and that the Met’s website describes as Paine’s largest and most ambitious work to date. It’s part of a series called The Dendroids that Paine began in 1998. These sculptures strongly reflect natural networks while retaining a clear modern, industrial influence.
An earlier work in the "Dendroids" series. Inversion, 2008.
The result? The Met’s roof garden is a far more interesting place to spend time this year than it was last year. Sure, “Balloon Dog” was cute, but it also was blindingly bright, and was so self-consciously ironic that it didn’t really draw you in. Maelstrom, on the other hand, takes over the whole rooftop and leans over the corner of the park; it’s impossible to spend any time on the roof without interacting with the sculpture, probably several times in different ways. Maelstrom gives you a sense of being in the center of a storm, a forest, some kind of natural happening that somehow mutated into shining steel. In a particularly trippy touch, a portion of the sculpture is screwed into the roof’s plumbing system.
Personally, I loved it. Go, get a “Maelstrom martini,” and spend some time touching and walking under the loops and branches. It’s the perfect place for a sunny summer interlude.
Nice! Is Paine the artist responsible for the similar sculptures that sprung up all over Midtown NYC parks last year? They were gorgeous.
Indeed he is. Unfortunately, they’re not in Madison Square Park anymore, I went in search of last week.