NEW YORK, NY.- Cynthia-Reeves announced the permanent installation of Jonathan Princes Vestigial Block at the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. The monumentally sized sculpture is one of three currently on display as part of the museums Sculpture Garden, surrounding the Zaha Hadid designed museum in East Lansing. The Sculpture Garden also features works by Roxy Paine and Steve Miller.
The bequeath represents a six figure gift from the donors Julie and Edward J. Minskoff, whose acclaimed collection of 20th and 21st century art includes works by Jeff Koons, Jackson Pollack, Roy Lichtenstein and Willem de Kooning. Mr. Minskoff is the President and founder of Edward J. Minskoff Equities, a New York-based real estate acquisition and development company headquartered at 1325 Avenue of the Americas in New York City. Part of the Minskoffs impressive art collection is on view there, and at 590 Madison Avenue the former IBM building, another Minskoff property. Included in the collection is another work by Jonathan Prince, Light Box, a black granite cube perforated by tubular negative space on all six sides.
Vestigial Block, another work exploring the cube, was first exhibited at the Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison Avenue as part of Princes Torn Steel exhibition. The series principal theme explores interrupted iconographic forms through oxidized and stainless steel surfaces. Additionally, Princes newest work, G2V, is on view at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza outside of the United Nations in New York City, and two earlier works can be seen at the Christies Sculpture Garden at 535 Madison Avenue. The artist has a mini-retrospective of his black granite sculptures and functional art, on view at ABC Stone in Brooklyn.
In commenting on his shift from stone to steel, Prince says, Steel is
an additive process; segments can be attached to the core material. As such - I am very excited by the notion that one can penetrate space by the additive process of steel fabrication in ways that could never be done in stone carving, where the sculptures entire mass must be present in the initial stone block. This is actually the reason I was initially interested in exploring steel as a medium. A point of interest in my work is the idea that even though the steel work was created in an additive fashion, the sculpture has often been reduced from the complete form or geometry. This contradiction in apparent form and process is shown to great example in Vestigial Block.