Robert Lobe, The Palm at the End of the Parking Lot, 1995

annealed hammered aluminum, stainless steel hardware, trunk and branches of a dead walnut tree

Laumeier Sculpture Park Collection with funds from the Mark Twain Laumeier Endowment Fund

Robert Lobe has described his sculptures as involving an interrupted, sacrificed-Nature that is not just borrowed, but violated. His works are created in nature and often reinstalled elsewhere as a sculptural echo of natural form. Inspired by this wildness and disorganized aspect of nature, Lobe’s The Palm at the End of the Parking Lot,1995, is a battered, aluminum-wrapped walnut trunk that exemplifies his continued interest in the violence of nature and obliterates the formal distinction between nature and technology with a battered layer of armor plate. Yet Lobe also preserves and protects the tree, as if technology is strong enough to reverse the ravages it has visited upon the landscape.

Location: South Lawn