Press Release
Artist Bio
Sponsorship
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mixed media

Public Art Fund Projects
in Central Park
A collaboration with the
Whitney Biennial

March 10, 2004 - May 30, 2004

At the Andrew Haswell Green Memorial
Near Fifth Avenue and 106th Street

Public Art Fund, in collaboration with the Whitney Museum, presents installations by Paul McCarthy, Liz Craft, Olav Westphalen, David Altmejd, assume vivid astro focus, David Muller and Yayoi Kusama for the 2004 Biennial Exhibition. Building upon the outdoor presentation of Biennial works in 2002, this year's show includes artists' site-specific reactions to Central Park as well as several sculptural projects that were conceived independently of location. For the first time, the exhibition includes a weekend event of openings and participatory artists' projects in the park.

Awkward yet elegant, David Altmejd's werewolf heads are carefully crafted sculptural objects that explore notions of attraction and repulsion. In their frequent appearances in fairy tales, Greek mythology, and Hollywood B-movies, werewolves trigger feelings of sympathy and horror. In his gallery installations, Altmejd depicts these creatures-part-human and part-beast-as decaying objects, often installing them within mirrored, modernist sculptural settings. For Central Park, Altmejd has created two oversized werewolf heads, each encrusted with glitter, pearls, and sparkling rhinestones and crystals. These heads, at once seductive and macabre, are installed in two Plexiglas cases, apparently preserving them in two starkly different stages of decomposition. Installed in a bucolic location in the northern end of Central Park, Altmejd's werewolf sculptures present the viewer with a melancholy, novel example of contemporary sculpture.

Artist Bio
David Altmejd was born in Canada in 1974. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 2001. He has recently had solo exhibitions at Galerie Optica, Montreal, Canada (2003); Galerie SKOL, Montreal, Canada (2003); and Ten in One Gallery, New York (2002). He has also participated in the group exhibitions "SCREAM," Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2004); 'Material Eyes', LFL Gallery, New York (2003); 8th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Dan Cameron, Istanbul, Turkey (2003); "Corporate Profits vs. Labor Costs", curated by John Connelly, D'Amelio Terras Gallery, New York (2003); and "Demonclownmonkey", curated by Matthew Ritchie, Artist Space, New York (2002). Altmejd currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Sponsorship
The Public Art Fund projects in Central Park, presented in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, are sponsored by Bloomberg and generously supported by Adam Lindemann.

David Altmejd's Untitled (Swallow) and Untitled (Bluejay) are projects of the Public Art Fund program In the Public Realm, which is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, A State Agency, the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs, the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President, The Greenwall Foundation, The Silverweed Foundation, The JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and friends of the Public Art Fund.

This exhibition is made possible through the cooperation of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.

Location
At the Andrew Haswell Green Memorial, near Fifth Avenue and 106th Street.
Nearest subway: 4, 5, 6 to 110th Street stop.
View a map of Public Art Fund Projects in Central Park --A collaboration with the Whitney Biennial.