Monira Al Qadiri:
First Sun

Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York
September 3, 2025 through August 2, 2026
Exhibition Review by Raphy Sarkissian

In the shadow of the Plaza Hotel, the city’s Gilded Age limestone meets the arboreal weight of Central Park. Here stands a seventeen-foot apparition of a human form, its visage eclipsed by a towering scarab. And yet Monira Al Qadiri’s First Sun does not declare a singular message. Rather, it arrests the onlooker, demanding a second look. This hermetic bust holds an irresolute purple while the scarab’s armored back, positioned where the human face should be, reveals an unfathomable chromatic transformation that reacts to external luminous conditions and point of view. Often displaying a singular hue or various tones across its surface simultaneously, the insect’s shifting colors re-enact the natural pearlescence of beetle shells, thus claiming to honor the mythological beauty of the organism. By grafting the carapace of a scarab onto a colossal human face, the sculpture positions itself as a revisionary landmark among its neighbors. Ancient Egyptian culture fabled the scarab as sacred to Khepri, god of the rising sun, resurrection, and transformation. Contrarily, the gilded militarism of Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Sherman Monument  (1903) and the classical femininity of Karl Bitter’s Pomona (1916) stand just steps away.

The work’s power lies in its material dissonance: its immense scale, its slick surfaces, and the sensory friction of hair against a shut face. Coated in automotive and Glasurit paints, the bust holds a deep purple while the scarab's presence discloses pink, purple, blue, and green as light varies and the passerby's vantage point shifts. The neoclassical facade of the Edmond J. Safra Synagogue on 63rd bears monumental bronze gates with the Tree of Life. Walking from there toward this partly lustrous head, one moves between diametrically opposite mythologies of regeneration: one highly aesthetic, the other highly synthetic. Joan Miró’s primal and whimsical Moonbird (1966) at the 58th Street plaza of the Solow Building has long since surrendered its strangeness to familiarity. First Sun arrives with the same surrealist force but remains futuristic and eerie, an object that demands its own textuality.

If First Sun  arrives as a counter-monument in space, Al Qadiri’s trajectory suggests it is equally a counter-monument in time, bypassing the traditional logic of permanence, heroism, and national memory. Having witnessed the 1991 Gulf War in Kuwait, with its oil wells set ablaze and its skies darkened, she later spent a decade in Tokyo completing a dissertation titled  “The Aesthetics of Sadness in the Middle East.”  This body of thought informs  First Sun, her translation of the Gulf’s history of petro-culture into aluminum and petroleum-derived pigments. In its synthetic finish, the surface invites a reading of 1970s petro-wealth: the decade when Gulf oil became a global power statement. The immediate catalyst was a visit to the Tomb of Pharaoh Ramses I in Egypt, where she discovered a painting of the scarab-faced god Khepri. It was a vision the sculptor would later translate into metal and paint. On the southeast corner of Central Park, the scarab operates with an uncanny opulence of chromatic trickery. Its murky grey plinth rises as a proscenium, staging the chromatic event above. Echoing Khepri’s daily ascent from beneath the earth, this figure emerges from its industrial base, carrying with it mankind’s paradoxical relationship with petro-culture and its ecological toll.

Standing between the work and its posted text, this industrially-finished surface demands an interrogation of our culture’s socioeconomic parameters, while the monumental form insisted on a rethinking of identity. Here the sensual hair comes forth as the intertwined turbulence of Zephyrus and Aura, the twin sources of a divine current of wind and breeze, now fused into a single, non-binary reality. Whereas Jeff Koons attaches his mirrored gazing balls to classical figures as a tool for reflexivity, Al Qadiri loads her sculpture with ancient myth, Central Park, and a singular career’s own set of agendas that continue pressing upon issues of the inherent artificiality of gender and geopolitics. What felt like fever was never the weather: it was the sculpture’s own conceptual demand, insisting upon the biographical, however embattled that word remains in the history of art theory.

Despite its fluid identity, the work does not stand alone. It steps into a living dialogue of monumental sculpture that refuses fixity, a conversation still forming and still contested. It shares the sentinel-energy of Wangechi Mutu’s guardians, the radical identity fluidity of Lee Bul’s practice across gender, race, and the boundaries of the human, and Simone Leigh’s Brick House with its face that demands contemplation. Wangechi Mutu and Lee Bul have made their mark on the Met’s outdoor facade niches. By erasing the literal face entirely, Al Qadiri joins a subaltern dialogue pressing against the canon of Fifth Avenue. The work arrestingly inhabits the lived reality of public space. In its sensibility it is closer to Gustave Caillebotte’s rain-soaked Parisian boulevards than to the hermetic space of the white cube.

Confronting Al Qadiri’s enigmatic head, one enters the grip of a dream episode, that threshold where mythology and surrealism overlap. In Egyptian legend, the scarab emerged spontaneously from the earth: self-created and parentless. Like the scarab, this figure seems to have emerged from nowhere, as if it were the state between sleep paralysis and waking. Here Fifth Avenue and Central Park meet the dreaming body and Realpolitik. The stylized physiognomy of the insect conveys the iconography of the sacred scarab, taking on the value of an amulet central to the apotropaic tradition of ancient Egypt. Against geostrategy, petro-culture, carbon-logic, and planetary warming, the scarab operates as it always has: a seal, a shield, a protection against what exceeds human scale. In Monira Al Qadiri’s First Sun, these forces converge in a single object like a chimera, at once self-reflexive and elemental.

Monira Al Qadiri: First Sun was co-commissioned by Public Art Fund and Lassonde Art Trail and presented at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, New York City, September 3, 2025 – August 2, 2026 and Lassonde Art Trail, Toronto, ON, September 10, 2026 – September 2027.