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Artist Bio
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painted fiberglass

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

March 10, 2004 - May 30, 2004

On Wien Walk near the entrance
to the Central Park Zoo
Enter park at Fifth Avenue and 60th 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.

Olav Westphalen's artistic practice locates itself between the realms of art and daily life, an approach pioneered by Allan Kaprow, with whom he studied in California. Westphalen views caricature and comics as a way to challenge the "serious" traditions of art. Inspired by the spate of recent news coverage of incidents involving domesticated wild animals-tigers in particular-Westphalen's The Weight of Dead Prey is a life-size sculpture of a ferocious tiger that reclines in a small fenced-in area alongside a path. Near the tiger are objects modeled after the toys given to large animals in captivity-balls with appendages that are literally made to approximate "the weight of dead prey." Positioned near the entrance to Central Park Zoo, The Weight of Dead Prey is a reminder-delivered with Westphalen's characteristic light touch-of our double-edged need to reign in nature's wild kingdom even as we romanticize it.

Artist Bio
Olav Westphalen was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1963. He studied at the University of California, San Diego (MFA, 1993) and Fachhochschule fur Gestaltung, Hamburg, Germany (MA, 1990). Westphalen has recently had solo exhibitions at Sculpture Center, New York (2003); Maccarone Inc, New York (2002); Michael Neff Gallery, Frankfurt (2002); Museum Liljewalchs, IASPIS, Stockholm (2001); and Swiss Institute, New York (2001). Recent group exhibitions include "After Effect," Centre d'Art Neuchatel, Switzerland (2001); "Tele[visions]," Kunsthalle Wien, Austria (2001); "Out of Bounds," Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles (2001); "Greater New York: New Art in New York Now," P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York (2000); "Fido," Hunter College Gallery, New York (2000); and "End Papers," Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York (2000). He currently lives and works in New York.

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.

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

Location

On Wien Walk near the entrance to the Central Park Zoo, Fifth Avenue and 62nd Street.
Nearest subway: N, R to Fifth Avenue stop or 4, 5, 6 to 59th Street stop.
View a map of Public Art Fund Projects in Central Park --A collaboration with the Whitney Biennial.