Photography courtesy of @timothyschenck
Public art in major cities often performs a delicate balancing act. It must command attention within an already saturated visual landscape while simultaneously offering meaning beyond spectacle. This spring, the Franco-British artist Charlotte Colbert introduces a work across Manhattan that attempts precisely this negotiation. Her project, Chasing Rainbows, unfolds as a pair of towering sculptures that bring a distinctly surreal sensibility into the heart of the urban grid.
Rising roughly thirty feet into the air, the mirrored steel forms appear less like traditional monuments and more like dream fragments momentarily anchored in civic space. Installed in two different neighborhoods, they create an unusual dialogue between locations that otherwise exist in separate rhythms of the city. Pedestrians encounter them unexpectedly—objects at once reflective and enigmatic, whose polished surfaces capture flashes of traffic, architecture, and sky.
Rather than competing with the skyline, Colbert’s sculptures engage it in a subtler exchange. The works gather fragments of the city’s movement and return them altered, as though Manhattan itself were briefly refracted through a lens of imagination.
Monumentality Without Authority
Historically, monumental sculpture has been closely linked with permanence and power. From equestrian statues to modernist abstractions, large-scale public works have often sought to embody civic identity or historical memory. Colbert approaches scale from a different philosophical direction.
Her sculptures possess the physical stature of monuments but not their rhetorical certainty. Their forms evoke mythology, dream imagery, and symbolic transformation rather than political commemoration. This distinction matters. By detaching monumentality from authority, Colbert allows the sculptures to function less as declarations and more as invitations—to interpret, to reflect, and perhaps to momentarily suspend disbelief.
The reflective surfaces reinforce this openness. As viewers move around the works, the sculptures become mutable, continuously incorporating their surroundings. The skyline bends across their curves; pedestrians appear and disappear across the polished steel. In this way, the city itself becomes part of the artwork’s composition.
Surrealism in the Civic Landscape
Colbert’s artistic practice frequently draws from the language of surrealism: archetypal imagery, dreamlike symbolism, and an interest in the subconscious. Translating that vocabulary into public sculpture introduces a curious tension. Urban space is typically defined by functionality—streets organize movement, buildings structure commerce, plazas facilitate circulation. Surrealism, by contrast, disrupts the predictable order of things.
Within this structured environment, the sculptures introduce a momentary rupture in the logic of the everyday. Their presence feels slightly improbable, as though an image from a dream had slipped into the architectural grammar of the city.
This is not accidental. Colbert has often explored how imagination operates within contemporary life, particularly in spaces that appear dominated by efficiency and rationality. By situating surreal imagery in a highly ordered metropolis, she underscores the persistence of the irrational—those moments of curiosity, reflection, and wonder that resist urban routine.
The City as Collaborator
One of the most compelling aspects of Chasing Rainbows lies in how it engages its surroundings. Unlike gallery installations, which operate within controlled environments, public works must negotiate constantly changing conditions: weather, crowds, shifting light, and the rhythms of daily life.
In Manhattan, those variables become collaborators. Morning sunlight transforms the sculptures into bright mirrors of the skyline; evening shadows soften their contours into darker silhouettes. At different hours, office workers, tourists, and local residents pass through the space, each briefly altering the visual narrative.
The project also carries a notable piece of civic history. According to the organizers, the installation represents the first collaboration of its kind between two New York City Business Improvement Districts—Flatiron NoMad Partnership and Meatpacking District Management Association—working alongside the NYC DOT Art Program to present a public artwork linking two separate neighborhoods.
This dynamic interaction suggests that the sculptures are less fixed objects than evolving experiences. Their meaning emerges through encounter—through the fleeting relationship between viewer, environment, and reflective surface.
The exhibition itself is curated by the public art agency New Public in partnership with the city and renowned art-world figure Simon de Pury. Their collaboration reflects a growing model for urban cultural projects: one in which municipal institutions, private organizations, and cultural practitioners converge to activate shared public spaces.
A Contemporary Civic Gesture
In recent years, cities around the world have increasingly embraced temporary public art as a way to activate shared spaces. These installations can foster cultural dialogue while offering residents a renewed perspective on familiar environments.
Colbert’s project participates in that broader movement while maintaining a distinctly poetic character. The title itself—Chasing Rainbows—evokes a pursuit that is both hopeful and elusive. Rainbows symbolize possibility, yet they remain perpetually out of reach. The phrase suggests aspiration without certainty, imagination without conclusion.
Such ambiguity feels particularly apt for a contemporary metropolis. Cities thrive on ambition, yet they are also spaces of constant transformation, where identities, aspirations, and futures remain perpetually unfinished.
A Pause in the Urban Rhythm
Ultimately, the success of public art may lie not in how long it stands but in how deeply it momentarily alters perception. Colbert’s sculptures encourage precisely that shift. Their scale captures attention, but their reflective surfaces invite contemplation.
For a brief moment, the city becomes unfamiliar again. A pedestrian notices the skyline refracted across curved steel. A passerby glimpses their own reflection mingling with the movement of traffic. The ordinary choreography of Manhattan is interrupted by a small, luminous anomaly.
In a city renowned for velocity and ambition, that pause—however fleeting—feels quietly significant. Through Chasing Rainbows, Charlotte Colbert reminds us that even within the most pragmatic landscapes, imagination retains the power to surface, shimmer, and briefly reshape the way we see the world.
