LAND BEFORE TIME_Three dinosaurs and a Gondola
313 Bowery, New York
GRANADA and Amanita are pleased to present, Land Before Time: Three Dinosaurs and a Gondola, an exhibition pairing three complete Maiasaura fossil specimens with Gondola Marianne Moore by John Chamberlain. This marks the first time a family group of Maiasaura dinosaurs has been exhibited together.
The fossil specimens are presented in collaboration with GRANADA, a cross disciplinary, vertically integrated endeavor that encompasses the full spectrum of activity surrounding natural history - from excavation and sourcing to scientific research, preparation, education, and exhibition. Working alongside GRANADA, Dr. Frédéric Lacombat and his team of paleontologists led the excavation, mounting, research, and scientific direction of these specimens.
The exhibition brings into direct dialogue two distinct categories of objects: paleontological specimens and postwar American sculpture. Installed in close proximity, the works are approached not as illustrations of separate disciplines, but as materially and formally comparable entities - objects shaped by processes of compression, accumulation, and transformation over time.
The Maiasaura was an herbivorous hadrosaur species whose name translates to “good mother lizard,” referencing evidence of nesting and parental care. The fossils are presented as complete sculptural forms. Their skeletal structures articulate a balance of mass and lightness: elongated spines, rib cages that expand and contract in rhythmic intervals, and limbs that register both weight-bearing function and latent movement. Preserved through fossilization, these bodies have undergone a profound material shift, in which organic matter has been replaced by mineral deposits. The result is not only a record of prehistoric life, but a transformation of bone into stone, forms that are at once anatomical and architectural.
In parallel, Chamberlain’s Gondola Marianne Moore, constructed from salvaged automobile steel, registers a different but related order of transformation. Emerging in the early 1980s, these works occupy a critical moment in Chamberlain’s practice, where his signature language of crushed metal achieves a heightened sense of compositional clarity and volumetric tension. Twisted fenders and compressed panels interlock to produce structures that evoke torsos, limbs, and skeletal frameworks. The works suggest a latent figuration: zoomorphic and bodily in their articulation, yet never fully resolved into representation. The full series comprises fourteen sculptures (including the large scale related work Dooms Day Flotilla). Five of the Gondolas are in the collection of the Dia Art Foundation in New York, NY and three are in the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX.
This oscillation between abstraction and figuration is central to Chamberlain’s significance. His use of industrial detritus - discarded car parts shaped by impact, force, and prior use - transforms the residue of American postwar industry into objects of sculptural complexity. Chamberlain’s Gondolas, in particular, carry a sense of compression and suspension, as if forms have been arrested mid-collapse. Their surfaces retain traces of paint, weathering, and stress, functioning as records of both mechanical and temporal pressure.
Rather than positioning fossils as scientific artifacts and Chamberlain’s works as purely artistic objects, the exhibition proposes a reversal: fossils are understood as sculpture, and sculpture as specimen. Both bodies of work function as records, snapshots of distinct temporal conditions. In Chamberlain’s case, the compressed remnants of late-industrial America; in the fossils, the preserved remains of life from approximately 76 million years ago.
The exhibition is grounded in a shared set of formal and conceptual concerns: mass, movement, ruin, time, and material transformation. Across both bodies of work, forms are shaped by forces beyond the artist or organism: pressure, collision, sedimentation, and decay. The Maiasaura skeletons articulate a structural logic of growth and support, while Chamberlain’s sculptures register rupture and recomposition. Yet both arrive at a similar visual language: interlocking systems of line and volume that suggest bodies - whether living, mechanical, or fossilized - caught in states of transition.
Visually, the installation is deliberately direct and dramatic, allowing the scale and presence of the
works to assert themselves. At the same time, the pairing is structured through a rigorous formal logic, emphasizing compositional parallels in density, silhouette, and internal structure. The result is not a juxtaposition for novelty, but a sustained inquiry into how objects carry time and how materials, organic or industrial, are reshaped into enduring forms.
Land Before Time: Three Dinosaurs and a Gondola frames both bodies of work as products of force and duration, where form emerges through compression, displacement, and time rather than singular authorship or intent. In doing so, the exhibition complicates conventional distinctions between artifact and artwork, proposing a shared condition in which objects, whether derived from prehistoric life or postwar industrial material, are continuously redefined by the processes that shape and preserve them. By aligning these works through their formal, material, and temporal qualities, the presentation offers a concentrated lens through which to consider how objects persist, accumulate meaning, and are recontextualized across disciplines.
GONDOLA
Gondola Marianne Moore is a large-scale painted and chrome-plated steel sculpture by John Chamberlain (1927–2011), one of the defining figures of postwar America sculpture. Created in 1982, the work belongs to Chamberlain’s mature period - when his command of compressed and welded automobile steel reached its fullest expression - and takes its title from the American Modernist poet who, like Chamberlain, transformed vernacular material into precise and luminous form.
The work is an unusually horizontal, low-slung composition that recalls its namesake: the gondola as vessel, as conveyance, as romantic object caught between industry and elegance. The surface combines Chamberlain’s signature chromatic complexity, painted steel in multiple hues, with the mirror finish of chrome plating, creating a shifting interplay between color and reflection that changes with light and viewpoint.
The titles of the Gondola series are inseparable from their meaning. Chamberlain’s deep appreciation for poetry was formed during his year at Black Mountain College in 1955, where Charles Olson was teaching and Robert Creeley was editing the Black Mountain Review. That encounter with American poetry - its compressed language, its insistence on the material fact of words - left a permanent mark on his practice. Each Gondola is named in homage to a writer he admired: Melville, Longfellow, Auden, Eliot, Marianne Moore. The naming is not decorative; it is structural, a way of asserting that the work carries the same ambitions as the literature it invokes.
