The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney has revealed leading British contemporary artist Thomas J Price will create the first in a series of three public sculptures to be installed in front of its building.
"The whole aim of it is to take contemporary art out to the people, so they don't have to walk through the doors of the museum to experience it," MCA director Suzanne Cotter told AAP.
The sculpture will be unveiled in spring 2025 and remain until autumn at one of the most prominent and busiest spots in the city, with a likely audience of millions of people.
Cotter can't reveal what the sculpture will look like, but promises it will be so large it will be seen from across the harbour, and from the Cahill Expressway.
It's the first artwork to be created for the Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission series, to be presented over the next three years.
Price's artworks highlight historical representations of Black people by updating the traditions of Greco-Roman sculpture for a contemporary audience.
Sculptures by Thomas J Price have appeared at venues including the National Gallery of Victoria. (Diego Fdeele/AAP PHOTOS)
Rather than creating art exulting gods, heroes and athletes, Price makes monuments to the everyday, such as a woman in a hoodie scrolling on her mobile phone.
It seemed incongruous but that was the point: the idea was to dismantle ideas about powerful figures and present an alternative that celebrates everyone, the artist said.
"For me, sculpture is about understanding your environment and your place in space, your connection to others and capacity for empathy," Price said in a statement.
"My ambition has always been that these works would bring communities closer together and live in the public realm as silent totems for change."
Price must be a busy man - the Sydney commission is one project in a long list of exhibitions and commissions underway around the world.
A solo show has just opened at Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands, he has featured in a new show at the Musee Rodin in Paris and another at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the US, and on top of that, a commission is under way for the yet-to-open V&A East Museum in London.
Anish Kapoor's massive Sky Mirror urged people to look up and away from the phones in 2012-13. (AP PHOTO)
Price's work will be familiar to Melbourne art lovers, with two of his sculptures featured in the recent Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria.
The museum has previously installed artworks on the Tallawoladah Lawn that encouraged crowds to turn away from the Opera House views - most memorably Jeff Koons' giant Puppy in 1995-96, which stood more than 12 metres and was made with 55 tonnes of soil and 60,000 flowering plants.
Then Anish Kapoor's massive Sky Mirror in 2012-13 heralded the beginning of the Instagram era, the artist's reality-flipping disc perhaps a final reminder to people to look at the sky and not their phones.
It's not yet known where Price's sculpture will go after it's been on display, but Cotter hopes it will at least remain in Australia, and she already has some ideas.
"We would love for it to become part of a permanent collection of public sculpture here in Sydney," she said.
"It could be part of a permanent sculpture garden on Circular Quay. That's a bigger conversation."
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