Heroic Shorepoints I

Heroic Shorepoints I presents viewers with a series of delicately balanced geometric volumes. The artwork is abstract and not meant to represent something else. Instead, as a visitor moves around the sculpture, its form appears to shift, collapse, and rearrange itself depending on the viewer’s perspective. The artwork’s bright red surface enhances that perceptual effect and stands in vivid contrast to the austere concrete building designed by architect Marcel Breuer in the Brutalist style.

James Rosati was an American sculptor who worked with wood, bronze, and marble, before focusing his attention on fabricated metals like zinc, stainless steel, and aluminum. He began his career making figurative artworks—artworks that resemble people or animals—but through the 1950s and 1960s began experimenting with sculptures that were not tied to representation. He became well known for his geometric sculptural vocabulary, which took on monumental proportions in the latter half of his career, exemplified by Heroic Shorepoints I and his stainless steel Ideogram, which stood in the plaza of the World Trade Center in New York until it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.