Crocodylius Philodendrus

Nancy Rubins

18 View the Map

About the Artwork

As part of her series Diversifolia– which in the scientific names of plants indicates a single species possessed with a considerable variety of leaf, Crocodylius Philodendrus employs clusters of bouquet like arrangements comprised out of a variety of animal forms that explode into space in all directions. Her calculated compositions employ a structural property called “tensegrity,” wherein individual parts are arranged in balanced compression and secured with tensile cables, that galvanizes the aluminium crocodiles, hogs and deer, cast iron tortoises, and bronze zebras into purely formal, abstract components as they propel into space due to their aggregate momentum. Circumnavigating her towering assemblage reveals the transformation of found objects and industrial refuse into expertly orchestrated abstractions that are fluid and rhizomatic in nature.

 

Artist interview

 

Year: 2016/2017

 


© Nancy Rubins. Photo by Lucy Dawkins. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

Material

Cast iron, brass, bronze, aluminium, stainless steel armature and stainless steel wire cable

Dimensions

433.1 x 548.6 x 489 cm

Artist Biography

Nancy Rubins

Nancy Rubins transforms industrial, manufactured objects—such as mattresses, appliances, and boats—into the building blocks of her physically commanding monumental sculptures. Acting as an intermediary between the past and future states of her chosen materials, Rubins hones the formal rather than functional qualities of the discrete components comprising a single, cohesive sculpture. Brimming with the entropic energies of a force of nature, her arrangements evoke a precarious equilibrium of objects in space. Rubins’s practice cites both the traditions of modernist American monumental sculpture as well as bricolage, ultimately serving to emphasize the aesthetic possibilities of quotidian objects.