Her art graces the walls of the country’s most prestigious museums, but Dorothea Rockburne’s monumental mural installations at a Midtown office tower could be headed for the trash heap, The Post has learned.
The murals the 83-year-old artist painted for what was then, in 1993, Sony headquarters are now in a building about to be gutted and turned into luxury condos. The fate of “Northern Sky” and “Southern Sky” in the building’s lobby hang in the balance.
“I’m heartbroken, absolutely heartbroken about it,” Rockburne told The Post, speaking from the Soho loft where she’s lived and worked for 40 years. “It is a very major work.”
Rockburne, a contemporary of painters Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, with whom she attended college, had a solo exhibition of her work at MoMA in 2013.
“She’s one of the most important artists to come out of the generation of late ’60s and early ’70s,” said Connie Butler, who headed the drawing department at MoMA during Rockburne’s show.
Butler said the murals were “really beautifully suited to the building” and destroying them would be “a terrible thing to do.”
Rockburne worked every day for two years to plan the murals after they were commissioned by Michael Schulhof, then head of SONY and a former physicist.
“He understood the mathematics of my work,” Rockburne said, explaining that the murals were based on chaos theory.
Rockburne spent eight weeks working with a specially trained crew to paint the orange-hued conceptual works at the 550 Madison Ave. building. They are painted on wallboard treated with a thin layer of plaster and stand 30 feet by 30 feet.
The murals received rave reviews in the art world. The New Yorker in 1993 referred to the Sony building’s lobby and said the “cosmological frescoes suit it to perfection.”
But two years ago, Rockburne got a letter from Sony, putting her on notice that the building, and the murals, had been sold.
‘She’s one of the most important artists to come out of the generation of late ’60s and early ’70s’
- Connie Butler on Dorothea Rockburne
The Chetrit Group, headed by developer Joseph Chetrit, paid $1.1 billion for the property and filed plans to convert the upper floors to condos.
Rockburne says she has heard nothing from Chetrit about her murals.
“I have repeatedly written them for two years,” she said. “I had a lawyer write them.”
Rockburne says the murals could be removed and donated to a museum. She even mentioned the possibility of a huge tax deduction to Chetrit in one of her letters.
Joseph Chetrit’s son, Jonathan Chetrit, told The Post that the company had been in contact with Rockburne and that she had been coordinating the fate of the murals with Sony.
“He’s bulls–ting you,” Rockburne told The Post. “I’ve been trying to contact him for two years.”