In Chicago, Google buys a building and drives out a monumental statue of Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet summoned to pack up... His sculpture

created in 1984 and since then enthroned on the forecourt of the Thompson Center in Chicago's Loop business district, will be dislodged.

In question ?

The takeover by Google of the building designed by architect Helmut Jahn, as told by The Art Newspaper.

The ten-ton work measuring almost nine meters was installed outside the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago even before the postmodern building was completed in 1985. It was in 1984 that art collector Ruth Horwich and co-founder of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, donated the towering fiberglass sculpture in honor of her late husband Leonard.

The sculpture will soon be relocated a few blocks in front of a former bank building that the State of Illinois recently purchased to replace the offices of the Thompson Center.

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Monument with Standing Beast

is perhaps the best known of the three large-scale public sculptures the French avant-garde artist installed in the United States (the other two are in New York and Houston).

cycle

, a series of works initiated in the 1960s consisting of paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectures or imaginary constructions.

The

erected in Chase Manhattan Plaza, New York dates from the same period.

Group of four trees,

a monumental work by Jean Dubuffet erected in New York.

Artedia Collection / Bridgeman Images

The date of the move of

to a less prestigious site has not yet been specified.

But already, this exile hurts art lovers, like Rolf Achilles, professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

he lamented to the

More philosophical, other neighbors interviewed by the daily simply consider themselves happy that the monument has been able to find a place in the city.