Press Release
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mixed media

MetroSpective

January 29 - November 8, 2003

City Hall Park

Public Art Fund and Forest City Ratner Companies is pleased to present an exhibition that brings contemporary art back to City Hall Park for the first time since 1992. MetroSpective celebrates ten years of Public Art Fund projects at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, revisiting six works that were first exhibited there. The retrospective at City Hall Park provides a new venue and audience for these seven artists: Art Domantay, Ken Landauer, Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, Peter Rostovsky, Do-Ho Suh, and Brian Tolle.

In Monument, a figure stands at the edge of a daunting precipice far above the head of the viewer, alone at the top of a dramatically jutting mountain. The tiny figure, dressed in a sports coat, is altogether ill-suited for the outdoors, as he peers gingerly from his perch looking out on the world around him. With its generic title and its faux-bronze appearance, Monument is in fact a monument to anyone and no one, dwelling on a state of mind instead of a person, place or thing.

Artist Bio
Peter Rostovsky fastidiously crafts sculptures and delicately executes paintings exploring the impasses that haunt "historical memory" and utopian imagination. Rostovsky hones in on historical and contemporary symbols of societal hopes and aspirations with his re-worked renditions of exhausted artistic genres, such as landscape painting, monumental sculpture and kitsch iconography. Cleverly approaching the deeply rooted problematics of these antiquated genres, Rostovsky exposes the absurdity of searching for heroes and epiphany through images of grandeur.

Sponsorship
This exhibition and the ongoing Public Art Fund program at MetroTech Center are sponsored by the MetroTech Commons Associates, an organization that consists of MetroTech companies Bear Stearns & Company, Forest City Ratner Companies, KeySpan, JPMorganChase, Polytechnic University, Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC), DOITT and E-911. Special thanks to First New York Management.

This exhibition is made possible through the cooperation of the Office of the Mayor of the City of New York and City of New York / Parks & Recreation, The Honorable Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor, and The Honorable Adrian Benepe, Commissioner, and William Castro, Manhattan Borough Commissioner, City of New York / Parks & Recreation.

Public Art Fund is a non-profit arts organization supported by generous gifts from individuals, foundations, and corporations, and with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs.

Location
City Hall Park is bordered by Chambers Street, Broadway, Centre Street, and Park Row.
The nearest subway stations are A, C, E to Chambers Street; 4, 5, 6 to Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall; N, R to City Hall; 2,3 to Park Place.