Standing 23 feet tall and weighing 2,300 pounds, a massive garden trowel looks like it fell from the sky and landed smack dab in the middle of Rockefeller Center. It's a sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, which was unveiled on Tuesday as somewhat of a tribute to New York City's reawakening.
Oldenburg and van Bruggen, which showcased a similar sculpture in red on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's rooftop in 2002, are known for reaching into the fruit bowl, the toolshed and the toybox for familiar shapes and colors. Then they'd enlarge and animate these objects, "fixing them in moments of energetic motion," reps of Rock Center say.
Of Oldenburg and van Bruggen's works, the best-known are the "Spoonbridge and Cherry" in Minneapolis, "Flying Pins" in Eindhoven, "Clothespin" in Philadelphia and "Dropped Cone" in Cologne.