Petrit Halilaj, Metropolitan Museum review — friendly neighbourhood spider sculpture

A colossal spider is smiling down on Central Park in New York. From the roof of the Metropolitan Museum, it waves its bronze-and-steel tentacles genially at the humans below. One limb provides a perch for a tiny bird stretching its wings.

The outsized arachnid is the centrepiece of the Met’s seriously charming rooftop commission by the Kosovo-born, Berlin-based sculptor Petrit Halilaj, who amplifies the school-desk graffiti of yesterday’s children into monumental doodles drawn in black metal lines. At the museum, a handful of these blown-up sketches ring the perimeter, like scrawls across the skyline. A brace of birds on the parapet coos in silent flirtation. A see-through flower blooms. A cockeyed house, or the heavy outlines of one, sports adornments: a stickman, a hairy eyeball, a five-pointed star and assorted flora. It’s as if a giant eight-year-old had been trapped on the museum’s roof terrace with a pencil the size of a spear.

Halilaj was born in Runik, Kosovo in 1986, and at 13, when the town was being levelled by bombing raids, fled with his family to Albania. He returned in 2010, just in time to witness the demolition of one of the few surviving buildings: his old elementary school. “I could not grapple with the idea that we would demolish the few buildings that endured the war rather than preserving them and the memories they carried,” he has said.

In despair at the waste, he was filming the school’s final moments when a group of kids demanded his attention, pointing to a pile of desks on its way to a dumpster. “Everything is in them,” the young student said. But it was the pictures scratched into the lids, rather than the abandoned contents, that captivated the artist. That moment — the meeting between an adult in mourning for his past and a child with an eye on the future — sparked his project.

Halilaj began documenting Runik’s runes, then went looking for more graffiti in schools throughout the Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Slovenia. Everywhere, he found, students had left decades’ worth of carvings, messages and marks, casual palimpsests that led him to see the preoccupations of childhood as a collective unconscious transcending location, nation, religion and war.

As the drawings entered Halilaj’s repertoire of associations and memories, they merged with his more expansive adult horizons. From the moment he saw the crude jotting of a sniggering spider in Skopje, Macedonia, he connected it to the transnational world of art. “All these references and fragmented memories are present, but then I find a spider doodle on a school desk, and I think of Louise Bourgeois,” he says. “That, for me, was magical.”

Bourgeois’ epic creatures are frightening, with their spiky legs and pendulous abdomens, magnified to monstrous scale. The most famous is “Maman”, a maternal beast that looms menacingly over such tiny humans as dare to venture beneath her belly. Halilaj describes his soaring sculpture as “my Bourgeois”, but it has a sense of humour that hers does not. It grins a bit madly but with no trace of malice. There is comfort in realising that the same image has the power to haunt a small child in Macedonia and a celebrated virtuoso of contemporary art.

Halilaj finds other affinities between his collection of schoolkid doodles and high-priced museum treasures. His flowers call to mind Andy Warhol’s screen-printed blossoms. The pigeons evoke the birds that Picasso drew in continuous lines, never letting his pen leave the paper. Picasso also sketched in three-dimensional space, flicking a light around a dark room while a photographer recorded the motion. Halilaj heads in the opposite direction, starting from two-dimensional sketches and deriving line drawings that you can look through and walk around and that would clang if you knocked them with a hammer. (Don’t.)

The Met sculptures oscillate between creepiness and wit; one moment you see a tragic relic of a childhood cut short, the next a whimsical fantasy come expansively to life. That ambiguity is rooted in the artist’s history. As a boy in an Albanian refugee camp, he encountered a team of Italian psychologists who were studying the effects of wartime trauma. They gave him a set of magic markers and he got to work representing the horrors his family had faced, including the bombing of his family home, columns of tanks and camo-clad soldiers standing above dead bodies. But alongside the world he had escaped, he also drew one he could escape into: birds in flight, trees bedecked in bright foliage. If circumstances couldn’t offer much consolation, he would supply his own.

That marbled sensibility, where a spoonful of seriousness gets swirled into an amiable confection, is just right for the Met’s rooftop. Playfulness intermingles with violence, evoking visions of play amid the ruins or blasted towns hoping to heal by razing the past. Here, long-ago acts of petty vandalism get elevated to elegant calligraphy at an urban scale, which makes them both a form of redemption and a way of wiping tough memories clean.

To October 27, metmuseum.org