John Chamberlain Sculpture Meets Rare Dinosaur Fossils in Bowery Gallery Show
A downtown New York gallery is testing the boundaries between sculpture, natural history, and the art market. At Amanita’s Bowery location, a rare John Chamberlain work is installed on the floor beside three mounted Maiasaura skeletons, creating an exhibition that is as conceptually charged as it is visually unusual.
The show centers on Chamberlain’s Gondola Marianne Moore (1982), one of only 14 works in the artist’s gondola series. The horizontal sculptures, assembled from crushed automobile parts, were designed to rest on the floor. Here, they are paired with three Maiasaura specimens from the Upper Cretaceous period, more than 70 million years ago. Jacob Hyman, a partner at Amanita, says the fossils are exceptionally complete, with each specimen made up of roughly 62% to 85% real bone.
Hyman says full, mounted Maiasaura fossils have never before been exhibited in New York in a downtown commercial art gallery. That rarity is part of the point. Chamberlain’s gondola works are themselves scarce, with most examples now held by institutions including the Dia Art Foundation and the Chinati Foundation. Hyman sees a formal connection between the two bodies of work: Chamberlain’s compressed metal forms and the geological processes that preserve fossils both speak to pressure, time, and transformation.
The exhibition also arrives amid a sharp rise in the fossil market. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, dinosaur skeletons have increasingly overlapped with contemporary art collecting, particularly at auction houses. In July 2024, a Stegosaurus fossil nicknamed Apex sold for $44.6 million at Sotheby’s New York, setting a record. Phillips later included a Triceratops skeleton in its contemporary art evening sale in New York last November.
That expansion has brought controversy with it. Some experts have argued that private sales of dinosaur fossils should end altogether. Hyman takes a different view, saying there is a case for placing such specimens in public spaces through private patronage, provided they are entrusted to responsible stewards.
The result is less a novelty than a pointed meditation on ownership, display, and the long arc of material survival. In a gallery on the Bowery, Chamberlain’s compressed metal and the fossilized remains of a prehistoric herbivore are made to share the same ground — and the comparison is difficult to ignore.
