Biography of Jonathan Borofsky
Bursting on to the scene in the late 1960s, Jonathan Borofsky was an entirely new breed of artist, capable of rendering profoundly humanistic experience through playfully repetitious and at times joyful work. A draughtsman, sculptor, painter, and installation artist, Borofsky showed an early proficiency for drawing having first trained as an architect.
Jonathan Borofsky initially made his reputation with bold and playful works that had an underlying philosophical edge. Combining a plethora of materials and subjects, his stunning, visually abundant exhibitions traveled around the world. An accomplished installation artist, Borofsky sees his practice as being an endless search to connect, even with his simplest work he wants to be "connected to the Whole." Best known for his enormous site-specific installations depicting human forms, his androgynous pared down sculptures seem to offer the delicious possibility of global connectivity. Molecule Man, in the middle of Berlin's River Spree, is perhaps the best-known example of this. Installed in 1999 the 30 meter high sculpture consists of three figures uniting at the point where three boroughs of Berlin previously divided by the Berlin Wall come together.
Born in 1942 Jonathan Borofsky studied at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and then at Yale School of Art and Architecture. Borofsky has put the emphasis on public commissions in the last twenty years, stepping out of the intimacy of the gallery to seize on the large-scale opportunities of the urban environment. His famous sculpture Walking to the Sky, 2004 was installed permanently in the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas and two others exist around the world. In 2015 the artist installed Running People at 2,616,216, 1979 at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art.
