An unlimited sculpture by Nick Cave is becoming a member of a rising assortment of outside works on the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Scheduled for an October unveiling, Cave’s cast-bronze “Amalgam (Origin)” (2024) can be located amongst items by Auguste Rodin, Louise Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei, Richard Serra, and Barbara Hepworth.
Standing at 26 ft tall, the sculpture depicts a gargantuan human determine comprised of vines of roses and different blossoms creeping up its appendages and torso. Rather than a head, tree limbs and branches sprout from the determine’s shoulders and attain to the sky — a few of them are abruptly truncated and capped with cast-bronze birds of all variations on disc-shaped pedestals, whereas others taper off into knobby, skeletal joints.
With birds and pure progress as motifs of evolution and migration, the Amalgam collection invokes the evolution of Cave’s well-known Soundsuits, first created in 1992 as a response to the extreme beating of Rodney King, a Black man, by Los Angeles police. The greater than 500 ornate wearable costumes had been meant to masks one’s racial, gender, and sophistication markers as a type of safety.
The Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park with works by Sophie Ryder (© Sophie Ryder; picture by Dean Van Dis)
“These newer sculptures denote a different sense of time than the movable Soundsuits: they appear steadfast in space, immutable, even resolute in their complication of clear meaning,” Hyperallergic‘s Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian wrote of the Amalgams in a review of Nick Cave’s 2025 exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, the place the collection debuted.
Cave, who accomplished his graduate research on the close by Cranbrook Academy of Artwork in Bloomfield Hills, mentioned in an announcement that having his first main outside sculpture in Michigan was a “full-circle moment.”
“I hope to see real birds nesting in the bronze branches when we visit next spring,” Cave mentioned.
“Amalgam (Origin)” can be put in alongside the Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park’s North Path, between the Richard and Helen DeVos Japanese Backyard and Michigan’s Farm Backyard.
