Los Angeles County Museum of Art sculpture garden Back to Sculptures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . . Los Angeles County Museum of Art sculpture garden Back to Sculptures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . ..
Return to Contents Return to start of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden . . About 600 works are on view in the galleries, plaza and garden at any one time. The collection's other strengths include contemporary art, European painting since World War II and American painting since the late l9th century. The contemporary period is the focus of works in the lower-level galleries (paintings, sculptures, mixed-media works) and plaza (monumental sculpture).
His love of wood stems from his exposure to African carving and carpentry traditions while a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone in the mid-1960s. He often combines different woods in a single sculpture, as in number 12 from the series Boy's Toys (1985), enjoying the interplay of textures and colors and the responsiveness of the woods to various carving and shaping techniques. Puryear's works on view inside the museum and in the Garden share similar elongated, usually cone-shaped forms tapering off from a broad base. However, their various approaches to scale, materials, and relationship to the viewer produce a range of responses. The two columns in Ampersand (1987-1988), flanking the main entrance to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, are a simplified version of the square-to-circular transition found in the Boy's Toy piece; but their massive scale and the brute quality of the granite make this work stand in sharp contrast to the delicately sensual smaller sculpture.
His love of wood stems from his exposure to African carving and carpentry traditions while a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone in the mid-1960s. He often combines different woods in a single sculpture, as in number 12 from the series Boy's Toys (1985), enjoying the interplay of textures and colors and the responsiveness of the woods to various carving and shaping techniques. Puryear's works on view inside the museum and in the Garden share similar elongated, usually cone-shaped forms tapering off from a broad base. However, their various approaches to scale, materials, and relationship to the viewer produce a range of responses. The two columns in Ampersand (1987-1988), flanking the main entrance to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, are a simplified version of the square-to-circular transition found in the Boy's Toy piece; but their massive scale and the brute quality of the granite make this work stand in sharp contrast to the delicately sensual smaller sculpture.
