Manolo Valdés may have capped the undertaking of Monumental Sculpture with multi-ton creations ferried by truck, crane, and ship, but that’s not where he began. First, he needed to gel his ideas on a smaller scale. If you happen to stop by the Library Building this winter, you’ll see the artist’s initial inspiration in his maquettes, now on display in the Orchid Rotunda.

Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

Photo by Patricia Gonzalez

Our Fall Forest Weekend is a go! Join us all through Saturday and Sunday to celebrate what our 50-acre old growth Forest has to offer, as well as the particolored creations of Kodai Nakazawa in our stunning kiku installation, and the seasonal sculpture of Manolo Valdés. Check here for the event schedule!

Chrysanthemum ‘NYBG Series Orange’ — Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

“In Spain, we say that when a person has a vivid imagination or is particularly jolly, he has a head full of butterflies.”

– Manolo Valdés

Photo by Mark Pfeffer

Nothing drives home the sheer enormity of our latest exhibition, Manolo Valdés: Monumental Sculpture, like seeing it built from the ground up. Over the course of two weeks, dozens of people and at least a few multi-ton machines were on the scene to put the final strokes on a work many, many months in the making. Naturally, we couldn’t pass up capturing some video.

From the first sketch put to paper in Valdés’ Manhattan studio, to the foundry in Madrid, and back across the 4,000 miles separating Spain and New York City, this production has proven nothing short of a massive undertaking. Carrying the collection of sculptures from the docks required a fleet of seven flatbed trucks. Once at the Garden, towering cranes were called in, gingerly rolling onto our lawns to settle each piece into its chosen site. And at 50 feet across and weighing nearly 20 tons, shipping any one of these sculptures as a single piece was out of the question; assembly called for even more precision cranework, with muscle on the ground to ensure everything was arranged to specification.
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Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

As of today, September 22, each and every sculpture has found its home in the Garden. Manolo Valdés: Monumental Sculpture will run through May 26, 2013, affording our visitors the opportunity to view the artist’s work as it was meant to be seen: through the lens of every seasonal landscape.

Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

Spend any time outside in the Garden this weekend and you’ll be hard-pressed to miss the work of Manolo Valdés. Trust me. The show officially begins September 22.

Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

We’re suckers for a good surprise (as long as we’re the ones behind it). But it’s a spot more difficult to keep the main event under wraps when it comes to exhibitions this impressive. Manolo Valdés casts a formidable shadow, sparing nothing to create some of the most striking–and colossal–visuals for our upcoming Monumental Sculpture exhibit; for the uninitiated, that’s our next major show here at the NYBG. And this week we jumped headlong into preparation for the September 22 opening.

All told, we couldn’t exactly sneak these sculptures into the Garden. Some of them, such as the Alhambra piece, weigh in at 40,000 pounds with spans reaching nearly 50 lateral feet; they’re not what you’d call statuettes. Arranging these monoliths has proven a spectacle in itself, drawing streams of visitors and employees alike, all snapping away with their cameras as we uncrate and maneuver massive heads and latticework by truck-mounted cranes. It’s a careful and dramatic process that we were able to capture a bit of in the last couple of days.
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Ed. Note: While Monet’s Garden continues to enamor thousands of visitors to the NYBG through the fall, we’re always preparing for new and intriguing exhibitions. This includes our latest artistic explorations, which will culminate with a long-awaited unveiling in late September: the renowned sculptures of Manolo Valdés. As our Director of Exhibitions and Seasonal Displays, Karen Daubmann offers an advance glimpse into the artist’s creative process.

A few of us were lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit the New York studio of artist Manolo Valdés a few weeks back. We were working on a plan for exhibiting his maquettes in the Orchid Rotunda of the Library Building during the course of his exhibition, Manolo Valdés: Monumental Sculpture. Though the exhibit on the grounds opens on September 22, the maquette display will open on November 3.

Maquettes are small-scale models of artworks which help an artist to develop an idea. You can think of it as a rough draft, or a sort of “sketch” of a sculpture, which helps the artist to visualize and test shapes and ideas without incurring the costs and effort necessary to produce the full-sized piece. You can see from the photos below the variety of ways in which Valdés has explored the butterfly motif in his work.
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