David Altmejd Whitney Biennial 2004 - Untitled (Swallow) and Untitled (Bluejay)

Public Art Fund, in collaboration with the Whitney Museum, presents installations by Paul McCarthy, Liz Craft, Olav Westphalen, David Altmejd, assume vivid astro focus, David Muller, and Yayoi Kusama for the 2004 Biennial Exhibition. Building upon the outdoor presentation of Biennial works in 2002, this show includes artists’ site-specific reactions to Central Park as well as several sculptural projects that were conceived independently of location. For the first time, the exhibition includes a weekend event of openings and participatory artists’ projects in the park.

Awkward yet elegant, David Altmejd’s werewolf heads are carefully crafted sculptural objects that explore notions of attraction and repulsion. In their frequent appearances in fairy tales, Greek mythology, and Hollywood B-movies, werewolves trigger feelings of sympathy and horror. In his gallery installations, Altmejd (b. 1974, Montreal, Canada) depicts these creatures—part-human and part-beast—as decaying objects, often installing them within mirrored, Modernist sculptural settings. For Central Park, Altmejd has created two oversized werewolf heads, each encrusted with glitter, pearls, and sparkling rhinestones and crystals. These heads, at once seductive and macabre, are installed in two Plexiglas cases, apparently preserving them in two starkly different stages of decomposition. Installed at a bucolic location in the northern end of Central Park, Altmejd’s werewolf sculptures present the viewer with a melancholy, novel example of contemporary sculpture.