Fernando Botero’s eight-foot-tall Spinx sculpture is on view at the 14th Street Square at 9th Avenue from March 10th through April 19, 2022.
The monument, presented by David Benrimon Fine Art, is in celebration of the artist’s 90th birthday, and coincides with the gallery’s Botero exhibition.
Presented in partnership with NYC DOT Art and the Meatpacking Business Improvement District (BID), “The Sphinx” is Botero’s interpretation of a mythical creature with the body of a lion and the head of a human, common to ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Central Asian mythology. In ancient Egypt, the sphinx is believed to have been seen as a spiritual guardian and was frequently included in imagery of tombs and temple complexes. Generally, sphinxes were depicted as male figures, crowned with pharaonic headdresses (as is the Great Sphinx) but likenesses with female features, such as the example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also exist. Arguably the best-known sphinx of antiquity is the Great Sphinx at Giza, likely built between 2558-2532 BCE during the 4th Dynasty on the west bank of the Nile, part of the necropolis of ancient Memphis.
David Benrimon Fine Art is located in the historic Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street, NYC. More images of The Spinx on 14th Street Here.
While you’re in the Fuller Building, view ‘A Female Gaze: Seven Decades of Women Street Photographers’ at Howard Greenberg Gallery, 8th Floor.
Walk over to Doris C. Freedman Plaza on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street to see Gillian Wearing’s sculpture of Diane Arbus through Public Art Fund.