Leidy Churchman

Tallest Residential Tower in the Western Hemisphere
2015

Not on view

Date
2015

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on linen

Dimensions
Overall: 72 × 60 1/8in. (182.9 × 152.7 cm)

Accession number
2015.164

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Avo Samuelian and Hector Manuel Gonzalez

Rights and reproductions
© artist or artist’s estate

API
artworks/47421

This painting depicts the view from 432 Park Avenue, a 1,396-foot-high luxury condominium completed in 2015. While the tower has been heralded as a marvel of contemporary engineering, it has also sparked an outcry over its impact on New York’s skyline and the stratospheric cost of its apartments. Leidy Churchman based his canvas on a computer rendering by DBOX, which the artist located on the building developer’s website, that juxtaposed a luxurious bathroom interior with the sprawling mass of lower Manhattan beyond. Churchman’s dizzying composition is at once inviting and disconcerting, hinting at the building’s controversial status as a symbol of the glaring divide between the ultra-rich and ordinary New Yorkers.

Audio

Leidy Churchman, Tallest Residential Tower in the Western Hemisphere, 2015

From Human Interest (Kids)

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Leidy Churchman, Tallest Residential Tower in the Western Hemisphere, 2015

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Narrator: From inside a bathroom high in the sky, we look down and see the skyline of Manhattan. With a palette full of pastel colors, Leidy Churchman shows us both an inside space and an outside space at the same time.
The artist made this painting based on an advertising photograph that was sent to newspapers before this extra-tall skyscraper was even built! Picture yourself in this painting’s beautiful pink bathtub, high above New York. It’s really calm, but kind of empty too, so far from the hustle and bustle of the city streets. Living in a tall penthouse in New York may be the ultimate luxury. But here Churchman suggests that living on top of the world could also be lonely.