Rockefeller Center Unveils Sculpture By German Iranian Artist Bettina Pousttchi. Artsy

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Rockefeller Center Installs Bettina Pousttchi's Twisted Guardrail Sculpture in the Channel Gardens

New York's Rockefeller Center has added a new jolt of industrial poetry to Midtown. On March 18, the complex installed“Vertical Highways V03” (2025) by German Iranian artist Bettina Pousttchi (b. 1971), placing the work in the Channel Gardens between Fifth Avenue and The Rink. The sculpture will remain on view through April 17.

At first glance, the piece reads like the aftermath of a collision: a cluster of red highway guardrails, bent and battered, gathered into a dense vertical tangle that stands in the gardens' central pavilion. The material carries the visual memory of speed and impact, but in Pousttchi's hands it becomes a kind of improvised architecture, a column built from the city's own protective skin.

Pousttchi has long worked with the hardware of public space. Across her practice, industrial objects such as crowd barriers and traffic bollards are treated not as neutral fixtures but as signals of how metropolitan life is organized - where bodies are directed, where movement is restricted, and how the built environment quietly scripts behavior.

“By installing my sculpture, 'Vertical Highways V03,' in front of Rockefeller Center, I want to initiate a dialogue of art and architecture that resonates with the urban history of New York City,” Pousttchi said in a statement.

Rockefeller Center leadership positioned the installation within the site's public-facing identity.“Bettina Pousttchi's 'Vertical Highways V03' transforms the language of infrastructure into a striking visual experience,” EB Kelly, head of Rockefeller Center and senior managing director of Tishman Speyer, said in a statement. Kelly added that public art has been central to Rockefeller Center's character, describing the new work as both contemporary in its materials and closely attuned to the complex's architectural legacy.

The Channel Gardens setting sharpens that conversation. Framed by limestone facades and the formal geometry of the gardens, the sculpture's mangled rails introduce a note of friction - a reminder that the city's elegance is inseparable from its systems of circulation, maintenance, and control.

The installation is also a milestone for the Berlin-based artist: it is the first time a work from her“Vertical Highways” series has been presented in the United States. Smaller versions of the series appeared in“Horizons,” Pousttchi's most recent solo exhibition at Berlin's Buchmann Galerie, mounted in September 2025.

Earlier presentations of“Vertical Highways” have unfolded in prominent public and institutional contexts, including the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, outside Berlin Central Station, and at Istanbul Modern. Pousttchi's work has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and MoCA Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai.

With“Vertical Highways V03,” Rockefeller Center offers visitors a sculpture that doesn't simply decorate a landmark address. It asks what the city is made of - and what kinds of histories are embedded in the materials we usually pass without noticing.

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