26-Foot Nick Cave Sculpture Heads to Michigan Sculpture Park
An enormous sculpture by Nick Cave is joining a growing collection of outdoor works at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Scheduled for an October unveiling, Cave’s cast-bronze “Amalgam (Origin)” (2024) will be situated among pieces by Auguste Rodin, Louise Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei, Richard Serra, and Barbara Hepworth.
Standing at 26 feet tall, the sculpture depicts a gargantuan human figure comprised of vines of roses and other blossoms creeping up its appendages and torso. In place of a head, tree limbs and branches sprout from the figure’s shoulders and reach to the sky — some of them are abruptly truncated and capped with cast-bronze birds of all variations on disc-shaped pedestals, while others taper off into knobby, skeletal joints.
With birds and natural growth as motifs of evolution and migration, the Amalgam series invokes the evolution of Cave’s famous Soundsuits, first created in 1992 as a response to the severe beating of Rodney King, a Black man, by Los Angeles police. The more than 500 ornate wearable costumes were meant to mask one’s racial, gender, and class markers as a form of protection.
“These newer sculptures denote a different sense of time than the movable Soundsuits: they appear steadfast in space, immutable, even resolute in their complication of clear meaning,” Hyperallergic‘s Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian wrote of the Amalgams in a review of Nick Cave’s 2025 exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, where the series debuted.
Cave, who completed his graduate studies at the nearby Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, said in a statement that having his first major outdoor sculpture in Michigan was a “full-circle moment.”
“I hope to see real birds nesting in the bronze branches when we visit next spring,” Cave said.
“Amalgam (Origin)” will be installed along the Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park’s North Path, between the Richard and Helen DeVos Japanese Garden and Michigan’s Farm Garden.
