Air Gets into Everything Even Nothing and Moon Rise East January from the new sculpture garden in downtown Des Moines.
Rondinone’s gnarled aluminum tree, which he painted with white enamel, was cast from a 2,000-year-old olive tree in the countryside near Naples, Italy, his parent’s hometown. In accordance with Italian law, the artist cast the living tree in rubber to create a mold that was then filled with molten aluminum.
The strange heads at the northeast corner of the park look as if they’re made of gloppy mud, but they were inspired by something loftier: They’re meditations on the Man in the Moon.
The Swiss artist Rondinone created a dozen heads in all, one for each month in the year. Here, Mr. January flashes an evil spike-toothed grin