Reimagining the Monument: Iván Argote’s Dinosaur
- SITE_SPECIFIC
- Nov 24, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 9
If you find yourself driving up 10th Avenue toward 30th Street in New York City, you may get the strange feeling you’re being watched — by a giant pigeon. Taking a stroll on the High Line, a public park made from a two kilometre stretch of the city’s decommissioned railway, you can stand beside this colossal bird: an aluminum, hyperrealistic sculpture by artist and filmmaker Iván Argote (b. 1983, Bogotá). With dusty grey feathers and the familiar violet sheen around its neck, the work unmistakably depicts the city’s somewhat feral rock dove, however it carries the playful title Dinosaur. The name refers not only to its extraordinary scale, modeled to the proportions of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but also to the evolutionary link between prehistoric dinosaurs and their modern avian descendants¹.
Towering almost six meters tall (around twenty times the size of an actual pigeon) the sculpture allows viewers to exchange perspectives with the animal and reflect on our dynamic relationship with the natural world. This exchange invites the horizontal, non-anthropocentric perspective that anchors much of Argote’s work, which encompasses sculpture, installation, film, and performance. As a Colombian artist based in Paris, his practice examines power structures, forms of dominance, and the mechanisms through which authority is produced and challenged. Notably, Argote is both the youngest artist and the first artist from the Global South to receive a High Line Plinth commission.
Established in 2019, the High Line Plinth features art installations that change every eighteen months and stands as the park’s first space created specifically for presenting new large scale contemporary art commissions. Through its dedicated multimedia program, which currently comprises ten works ranging from sculpture and murals to rotating billboards and video pieces, the High Line provides free, continuous public access to art.
Prominently located at the High Line Spur, an open plaza located at its northern hub, the Plinth has quickly become an iconic feature of the city’s cultural landscape. Past commissions such as Old Tree (2023) by Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz (b.1983, Altdorf), a 25 foot vivid red biomorphic tree-like sculpture evoking both vegetal and vascular forms, similarly explored the relationship between humans and the natural world. If you are curious to see a Plinth sculpture close to home², the inaugural commission, Simone Leigh’s Brick House (2019) is currently on view in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, installed on the grounds of the Grand Resort.
Argote’s Dinosaur was selected from the eighty proposals submitted for the third Plinth commission, ultimately being chosen as the fourth, which is now on view from October 2024 to spring 2026. Five years in development, the sculpture is also a technical feat, weighing 910 kilograms (one US ton). After casting the aluminum form, Argote and his team undertook an intensive hand-painting process covering nearly 93 square meters. This meticulous work reveals itself in the subtle shifts of grey across the feathers, the vivid orange ring around the pigeon’s eye, and the finely detailed pink scales of its feet, each element painted with striking precision. The combination of industrial fabrication and careful hand-finishing underscores the compelling interplay between mechanical processes and the human hand.
Turning to the symbolic role of the pigeon, Argote foregrounds an ubiquitous, yet often overlooked urban cohabitant, a creature as emblematic of New York as yellow taxis or hot-dog carts. Brought to North America in the 1800s, pigeons carry an implicit narrative of migration and adaptation, a history that resonates with many communities. Their extraordinary navigational abilities even earned some pigeons gallantry awards for their service in the First and Second World Wars. By monumentalizing this marginalized bird, the artist challenges the very conventions of the monument — structures long dominated by triumphal narratives of those in power, that often celebrate figures linked to oppression, colonialism, racism, or violence, which in turn erases or diminishes the communities affected by those histories. Alternatively, Argote has described Dinosaur as a kind of dissident or antihero monument and a speculative fiction of dominance, passing from dinosaurs to humans to pigeons.³
This inquiry into hegemonic power structures and renegotiation of public space is central to Argote’s practice. In Descanso (2024), presented at the 60th Venice Biennale, he created a replica of Madrid’s Christopher Columbus monument, dismantling it and letting its fragments settle into the surrounding landscape. Through this gesture, he symbolically dismantled colonial authority and reimagined it within a horizontal framework, one that embraces nature rather than resists it.
With Dinosaur, Argote asks us to reconsider how power is constructed, remembered, and
displayed in public space, this time turning our attention to the unexalted pigeon. His gesture has been a successful one, in June 2025, the High Line presented Pigeon Fest to celebrate both the artwork and National Pigeon Appreciation Day, where many gathered to learn more about urban wildlife, migration, and the politics of monuments. Thus Dinosaur indeed sparks a more expansive, inclusive understanding of collective memory and opens the door to more imaginative futures.
Text by Nora Brown
Address:
10th Avenue and West 30th Streets
New York
USA
Commissioned by:
High Line Plinth
Notes:
IVÁN ARGOTE, “IVÁN ARGOTE ‘DINOSAUR’ at the High Line in New York”, YouTube video, 6:25, posted May 8, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti6BdkWwotQDinosaur
For the readers, located in Switzerland. https://www.laesplora.com/kunst-trifft-auf-luxurioesen-raum-grand-resort-bad-ragaz/
IVÁN ARGOTE, “IVÁN ARGOTE ‘DINOSAUR’ at the High Line in New York”, YouTube video, 6:25, posted May 8, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti6BdkWwotQDinosaur
