Jan. 31 (UPI) — New York City has unveiled its own sculpture to mirror Chicago’s famed “Bean” after years of construction.
International artist Anish Kapoor, who created Chicago’s Cloud Gate sculpture in 2004, unveiled the $10 million reflective bean Tuesday at 56 Leonard Street in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood.
New York’s bean, which is not as tall as Chicago’s, measures 48-feet long and 19-feet tall.
The 40-ton squashed version of Chicago’s 110-ton sculpture has been under construction at the Jenga building since February of 2019. Work on the installation, which sits below a second-floor overhang, stopped during the COVID-19 pandemic because the team building it could not travel from Britain to finish the job. The sculpture, which has been hidden behind scaffolding, eventually became known as “half bean.”
“The city can feel frenetic, fast and hard, imposing architecture, concrete, noise. My work, at 56 Leonard Street, proposes a form that though made of stainless steel is also soft and ephemeral,” Kapoor, who owns a four-bedroom apartment in the building, said in a statement Tuesday.
“Mirrors cause us to pause, to be absorbed and pulled in a way that disrupts time, slows it down perhaps; it’s a material that creates a new kind of immaterial space,” Kapoor added.
While New York’s bean has finally been unveiled, it still has no name. The sculpture’s title is scheduled to be revealed this spring.