According to the The New York Times: Over the last 10 years, Brooklyn based artist Orly Gender “has become known for creating ambitious installations from seemingly endless coils of rope that she crochets and teases into shapes that recall modern masterworks.”

“In 2007 Genger filled a Chelsea gallery with 250,000 feet of knotted, paint-saturated rope called “Masspeak”, creating a black, lava-y environment that suggested Walter de Maria’s “Earth Room.”

“The next year, using similar materials, she built an even larger installation entitled, “Whole”, for the lobby of the Indianapolis Museum of Art — a sly take on the aggressive metal stacks and cubes of Minimalists like Tony Smith and Donald Judd.”

“In 2010, for a show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass., Ms. Genger used 100 miles of red painted rope to create “Big Boss,” an 11.5-foot-high stack that burst through a gallery wall and bubbled over for 28 feet into an adjoining room — a giant Color Field painting run amok.”

“Now Ms. Genger, 34, has delivered her largest and most labor-intensive work yet, a public sculpture in Madison Square Park called “Red, Yellow and Blue.” On view through Sept. 8, it’s made of 1.4 million feet of hand-crocheted lobster-fishing rope, which she has used to create three towering enclosures, each painted a different primary color.”

“For the last two years, she and a team of assistants have spent almost every day in her studio cleaning lobster claws and fish bones out of the rope and crocheting it into the chunky scarflike strips, some 150 feet long, that she used as building blocks.”

“Regarding the sculpture, Susan Cross, the curator of Mass MoCA curator who commissioned the piece “Big Boss,” says, “Everyone can relate to it, even though it’s this overwhelming size. You see that it’s rope, but you understand the labor involved. It really pulls people in.” Susan Cross also calls the artist, “a force of nature.”

“Read more about Orly Genger and her newly installed piece, “Red, Yellow and Blue.” The piece will reinstall it in October at the deCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Mass., where it will remain for a year.

 

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