The Landcraft Garden Foundation’s Sculpture In The Garden Featuring Artist Virginia Overton

The Landcraft Garden Foundation presents its 2023 season with the outdoor exhibition “Sculpture in the Garden” featuring the work of acclaimed artist Virginia Overton. The third annual exhibition will be on view at Landcraft Gardens through October 28, and is curated by the internationally celebrated artist Ugo Rondinone. An opening was held on Saturday, June 3.

In her art practice, Overton creates sculpture and installation, repurposing materials commonly associated with factories, farms, and construction. By means of both subtle and drastic interventions, Overton recontextualizes these ordinary objects, revealing their intrinsic properties, which highlights the wear accrued by passing time. Many of her works are assembled with industrial materials that have been reconfigured to take the composition of naturalistic forms.

“Virginia Overtone is to be applauded for bringing into the history of sculpture a unique sensibility, a haunting voice, and images of such incisive clarity that they can permanently alter your perceptions,” Rondinone said. “The work is bare, elegant, precise, funny, and grounded firmly in close observation of both the natural world and human psychology. She balances these often-startling juxtapositions with simple settings of straightforward found objects, making the complexity of her art a matter of depth and surface. What results is an environment with a state of being like a psychedelic garden where powerful objects attract, repel, and ultimately absorb all living things into their vivifying field.”

A hidden gem on the North Fork, Landcraft Gardens offers four acres of botanical gardens surrounded by nearly ten acres of meadows, which are open to the public on Fridays and Saturdays. The Foundation seeks to activate the artistic community of the North Fork with annual exhibitions that provide opportunities to view sculpture in dialogue with natural flora. 

The inaugural Sculpture in the Garden was launched in 2021 with the work of artist Ned Smyth. Last year the series featured sculpture by the artists Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez. Both exhibitions were curated by Rondinone, a member of the Landcraft Garden Foundation Art Advisory Board.

Visitors to the Garden this season will encounter five of Overton’s works, including “Untitled (chime),” a massive work which is both sculpture and sound installation. In “Untitled (chime),” an array of tools and other miscellaneous parts from Overton’s studio are arranged by ascending weight and suspended from a framework of steel I-beams. In a 2017 sculpture, a wood piling is unexpectedly juxtaposed with the addition of a piece of clear acrylic plexiglass placed at a perpendicular angle.

Last year, Overton received widespread recognition for her sculptures The Milk of Dreams at La Biennale di Venezia, a permanent commission for the Delta Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, a solo exhibition in London at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art and an installation in Celine’s new flagship store in Paris.