Featured photo by Ken Lund, via Flickr
If you’ve ever wanted to see a ten ton 29 foot tall Jean DuBuffet statue walk three blocks down a busy Chicago street, you’ll have your chance thanks to Google.
According to The Art Newspaper, Google is planning to acquire new office space in downtown Chicago but don’t really care for the DuBuffet statue titled “Monument with Standing Beast” that has been in front of the building since 1985.
Per Benjamin Sutton:
After the state of Illinois sells the Thompson Center to Google—via a consortium of developers who will retrofit the iconic building to the tech giant’s specifications—it will relocate the ten-ton Dubuffet sculpture about three blocks south to 115 South LaSalle Street, a former bank building the state recently purchased to replace the office space it is losing at the Thompson Center.
Monument with Standing Beast is perhaps the best-known of the French avant-garde artist’s three large-scale public sculptures in the US (the others are in New York and Houston). Made up of four shapes representing an animal, a tree, an architectural form and a portal, it was based on the artist’s Hourloupe drawing series of the 1960s. Ruth Horwich, an art collector and co-founder of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, donated the hulking fibreglass sculpture in honour of her late husband Leonard Horwich.
The Art Newspaper
No word yet on when “Snoopy in a blender” — it’s unofficial nickname — will be moved down the road or which Jeff Koons statue Google will buy to replace it.
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