Fabricated in aluminum and coated in white enamel, Ugo Rondinone’s sculptures for the sixth Art on the Plaza—Creative Time’s series of commissions outdoor sculpture for The Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park City—were cast from olive trees found outside Naples, Italy. By introducing metallic casts of this ancient and fabled tree to Lower Manhattan’s modern, concrete metropolis, Rondinone explored themes of time, displacement and the relationship between natural and artificial environments.

Rondinone titled the sculptures with an original short poem: air gets into everything even nothing and get up girl a sun is running the world. By winter, his white tree sculptures just as poetically complemented New York City’s snowy landscape.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Ugo Rondinone

Art on the Plaza 6: Air gets into everything even nothing and Get up girl a sun is running the world

Manhattan

2006