When you visit Galerie Perrotin in New York, you can see a gang of baby polar bears playing, dancing and swinging through the air, filling up the all-white room with their colorful fluorescent feathers.
They were created and positioned accurately by artist Paola Pivi, who is no stranger to making a multi-colored, feather-covered bear installations. She has made full-scaled bears a lot of times before, taking one-parts inspiration from her previous home, Alaska, and one-parts from India.
“Like the majority of her work,” curator and writer Justine Ludwig said to Design Boom. “We are the baby gang also draws from Pivi’s personal narrative. Specifically, the aesthetics of parenthood. She is inspired by miniaturized objects that began to populate her surroundings when her son came into her life— shoes fit in the palm of one’s hand, toys are the world made small and reimagined in electric tonalities. When Pivi became a mother the objects around her began to shrink in size to fit to needs of her son. She came to occupy the world in miniature. everything is made cute and precious. It is a constant reminder of precariousness and responsibility. Like a human child, the baby bears, even in their ferocity, need protection.”
