Five-foot-tall Bronze Teddy Bear Coming to Tribeca Park in the Spring
A big, brown teddy bear sculpture will greet visitors of Tribeca Park starting in May.
Korean sculptor, painter and filmmaker Gimhongsok’s Bearlike Construction, which looks like it’s made of stuffed-full garbage bags but is actually composed of bronze, will be on display in the triangular park—at West Broadway, Sixth Avenue and Beach Street—for six months. The 5-foot-high installation, represented by the Chelsea-based Tina Kim Gallery, will replace Cheryl Farber Smith’s “Mellow Yellow,” a bright-yellow aluminum sculpture that has been installed in the park since last spring.
Nicole Calderon, of Tina Kim Gallery, wrote in a statement that Bearlike Construction “challenges the viewer to consider the contradictions and blurred boundaries of fact and fiction, originality and the copy, banality and the spectacular.”
The piece was a hit at Art Basel in Miami Beach where one critic wrote, “The sculpture appeared to be trash bags, and made me question what I had abandoned along with my childhood.”