A huge sculpture by Nick Cave takes part in a growing collection of outside work in the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Posted in October, Cave’s Cast bronzen “Amalgam (Origin)” (2024) will be among the pieces by Auguste Rodin, Louise Bourgeois, AI Weiwei, Richard Serra and Barbara Hepworth.
Standing on 26 feet long, the sculpture shows a gigantic human figure consisting of vines of roses and other blossoms that crawl his appendices and hull. Instead of a head, tree benefits and branches sprouts from the shoulders of the figure and reach to the heavenly-bullbar are abruptly cut off and covered with cast bronze birds of all variations on slice-shaped bubbles, while others tapered in Knobby, skeletal joints.
With birds and natural growth as motifs of evolution and migration, the Amalgam Series evokes the evolution of Cave’s famous Sounds EitenMade for the first time in 1992 in response to the serious mistreatment of Rodney King, a black man, by the police of Los Angeles. The more than 500 graceful portable costumes were intended to mask someone’s racial, gender and class markings as a form of protection.
“These newer sculptures indicate a different sense of time than the movable Sounds Eiten: They seem steadfast in space, unchanging, even determined in their complication of clear meaning, ” HyperallergicThe editor -in -chief HRag Hrag Vartanian wrote about the Amalgamous In a review of the Nick Cave’s 2025 exhibition in Jack Shainman Gallery, where the series debuted.
Cave, who completed his graduated studies at the nearby Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, said in a statement that having his first big outdoor sculpture in Michigan was a “full-circle moment”.
“I hope to see real birds nesting in the bronze branches when we visit the following spring,” said Cave.
“Amalgam (Origin)” will be installed along the Noordpad of the Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, between the Japanese garden of Richard and Helen Devos and the farmer’s garden of Michigan.
