It seems like just yesterday that Jeff Koons’ 42-foot flowered “Puppy” graced Rockefeller Center, with the iconic image continuously surfacing but the artist hasn’t had a piece at Rockefeller Center in 14 years. That’s about to change with the unveiling of “Split-Rocker,” a 150-ton, 37-foot flower-sculpture that’s half pony, half dinosaur.
Currently, you can see it come to life as live flowers get grafted onto the base before the June 27th unveiling. It’s been on display three times before since its inception in 2000, but just in Europe at the cloister of the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 2000, in the gardens of Versailles in 2008, and lastly at Foundation Beyeler.
According to Foundation Beyeler, Split Rocker is a “disassembled and differently reassembled figure that simultaneously looks forward and to the side. Split-Rocker relates to the Cubism of Picasso while at the same time turning it in an entirely new direction…With the combination of pony and dinosaur, Split-Rocker embodies that confrontation of opposites that is also expressed in the notion of a “monstrous,” gigantic children’s toy. Yet the artist chooses transitory flowers, of all things, as the material for a monument that promises duration. It is not least in this special interplay of supposed opposites that the true tension and force of Koons’s art lie.”
