The modern giants of sculpture are mostly all represented at Storm King (I couldn’t find Chilida’s name on the list) and the 500 acres of rolling hills along the Hudson is their giant playground. We walked seven and a half miles ( sometimes in circles) and we didn’t see it all but we made sure we found Sol Lewitt, Henry Moore and David Smith. You couldn’t miss Alexander Calder and it was majestic. We loved David Von Schlegell’s three floating, aluminum, tubular squares and we spent some time studying it from various vantage points.
I first became aware of Richard Serra when his “Tilted Arc” met with all that controversy. I have followed him since and I love his heroic slabs of steel but also his graphic work. The four slabs he installed here, spread over ten acres, each emerge from the hillside, a wondrous collaboration between god and man.
Alyson Shotz’s “Mirror Fence” is such a simple concept, a picket fence covered in mirrors, 138 feet long in a perfectly straight row, keeping nothing in or out but reflecting its surroundings. You have to look to even see it.
Alfred Hrdlicka’s “Golgotha” (1963), named after the site of the crucifixion, is startling in this setting. So human, no steel girders involved, it would be at home in the first century Roman and Greek sculpture wing of the Metropolitan. I really loved this one as it seemed to bring everything back to earth.
Ellsworth Kelly has a way of clearing the air. His work is so clean, so essential, so right on. There is nothing more to say. Here it is.
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