Image: Sandra Mika
For one day only on Wednesday (2 February ), German artist Niclas Castello’s “The Castello CUBE” was placed in Central Park, New York.
The 24-karat, 999.9 pure gold cube wheeled out in the park is estimated to be worth around US$11.7 million. According to the artist’s team, the cube is not for sale.
Prior to the official day, Castello teased the public with the exact coordinates of the location on black trucks that drove around Times Square.
Measuring over a foot and a half on all sides, “The Castello CUBE” is hollow with a wall thickness of a quarter inch. It was cast at Art Foundry H. Rüetschi in Switzerland with a special handmade kiln due to its size and volume. Extreme temperatures of up to 1100 degrees Celsius were required to melt the gold.
Certainly attention-grabbing and hard to miss, the 410-pound work was guarded heavily with a security unit. According to Artnet News, Castello said the idea was to “create something that is beyond our world — that is intangible”, and referred to it as a conceptual piece in all its facets.
Image: Sandra Mika
Along with the installation, the 43-year-old artist had also launched The Castello Coin. The cryptocurrency is traded as $CAST and available for purchase online. The Coin will act as a bridge between traditional and new — amid the worlds of finance, investment, cryptocurrencies, and the digital age. An upcoming NFT auction is scheduled for 21 February 2022.
The contemporary artist was born in 1978 in East Germany and currently resides between New York and Switzerland. Castello was influenced by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which directed his focus to the world of Pop Art and the Neo-Expressionism of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Several of his works incorporate cube-inspired structures as well.
Widely known for his illustrious and critically acclaimed work of “Cube-Painting-Sculpture” in 2016, Castello often presents pieces that continue Andy Warhol’s perspectives. In the German artist’s body of works, he often conveys strong messages on the consumer world and its relationship to art and society.
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