NEW YORK, NY.- Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced today that British artist Cornelia Parker has been selected to create a site-specific installation atop the Met's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. The installation will be on view from May through October 2016, and will be the fourth in a series of site-specific commissions for the outdoor space.
Mr. Campbell said, "The Roof Garden should always be a space that makes us think beyond its spectacular views. It is a unique source of inspiration for the artists who create site-specific works there, and I am excited to see what Cornelia Parker will create. Her work is remarkable for the ways in which she looks at things we think of as familiar, and up-ends our perception of them in the process."
Sheena Wagstaff, the Museum's Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art said, "In her large-scale installations, Cornelia opens our eyes to the special qualitiesand sometimes darker significanceof familiar places and things we tend to overlook. Her insatiable curiosity often leads her into difficult cultural territories, but the results are never less than provocative and surprising. We look forward to sharing Cornelia's site-specific installation and its unique take on an aspect of American architecture when the Roof Garden opens next spring."
Cornelia Parker (born 1956, Cheshire, England) studied at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design (1974-1975) and Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1975-1978), and received her MFA from Reading University in 1982. Parker lives and works in London. She is well known for her large-scale, often site-specific, installations. Her engagement with the fragility of existence and the transformation of materials is exemplified in two works: Cold Dark Matter (1991), a cartoon-like reconstruction of an exploded army shed, and Heart of Darkness (2004), the formal arrangement of charred remains from a forest fire. Parker has had numerous solo exhibitions, including a 2015 retrospective at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, The Whitechapel Gallery, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Serpentine Gallery. International exhibitions include the 2014 Gwangju Biennale, 2013 Venice Biennale, and 2008 Sydney Biennale. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997. She is a Royal Academician and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010. Parker's work is included in many private and public collections around the world including the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, de Young Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Yale Center for British Art.
Parker is featured in Season 3 of the Metropolitan Museum's online series The Artist Project, also supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The episode can be viewed here.
This year's Roof Garden exhibition will be overseen by Sheena Wagstaff, and organized by Beatrice Galilee, Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design in the Met's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.
It will be accompanied by the fourth in a series of books considering the annual Roof Garden projects to be published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.