On a farm in north Auckland, New Zealand, sits a most bizarre sculpture that fools the eye into seeing the landscape in comic-book fashion. Artist Neil Dawson’s commissioned “Horizons” is 118 feet long, four stories high, NPR reports, and made from metal and steel. At first glance, it seems two-dimensional and looks like a giant-sized piece of paper dropped from the sky. Or like a Roy Lichenstein drawing on a hill. Or like God drew on Earth and sky with a pencil.
The owners of Gibbs Farm, Alan and Jenny Gibbs, have commissioned new pieces of art rather than buy them in a gallery, and exhibit them on their farm-cum-sculpture park to artists, educational institutions, charities, and the public by appointment only.
“The challenge for the artists is the scale of the landscape; it scares them initially,” Alan Gibbs is quoted on the Gibbs Farm website as saying, and demands something more from them.
The site on Kaipara Harbour puts other sculpture parks to shame with the contradiction of natural and manmade beauty alone. The congregation of sculptures by Sol LeWitt, Anish Kapoor, and Richard Serra adds to a petting-zoo’s worth of exotic fauna: The Gibbses threw in “a few giraffes, zebras, water buffalo and yaks to give the place a little biological variety,” NPR reports.
