SYDNEY.- Tatzu is known for bringing ‘home to the art’ rather than art to the home, enclosing public monuments within private settings.

Two new ‘homes’ have been constructed for his Kaldor project outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales swallowing up Gilbert Bayes’ grand bronze equestrian sculptures, The Offerings of War and The Offerings of Peace. Both sculptures have been transformed within makeshift domestic rooms, making them appear outsized and surreal within familiar settings. Visitors can enter into these surprising new spaces and experience the sculptures up close in their new environments.

The project is the latest from Tatzu Nishi who has been building domestic spaces around public monuments, artworks and streetlights for over a decade. He incorporates these familiar, pre-existing structures into temporary, intimate domains, forcing us to reconsider the public/private divide and changing their heroic message. Previous works have taken him to Tokyo, Dublin, Berlin, Basel, Seville, Los Angeles and now he is here in Sydney. Tatzu is most widely known for constructing a kitchen around Picasso’s iconic Femme au fichu bleu within its museum setting, and for the functioning 5 star hotel he built around a statue of Queen Victoria for the 2002 Liverpool Biennial in the UK, where visitors were invited to ‘spend the night with Queen Victoria’.

War and peace and in between is the latest in the series of Kaldor Public Art Projects in Australia since 1969. It accompanies a major survey of these ambitious public art commissions, started by John Kaldor 40 years ago when he invited Christo and Jeanne-Claude to wrap 2.5 kilometers of Little Bay’s coastline in fabric. There have now been nineteen public art projects, including Gilbert & George’s The Singing Sculpture in 1973, Jeff Koons’ Puppy in 1995, Gregor Schneider’s cells on Bondi Beach in 2007, Bill Viola’s video installations in a Redfern church last year, and this latest Kaldor Public Art Project by Tatzu Nishi.