Five Points Bakery has added a super cool and mind-bending work of art to its growingly complex landscape. This time, the baking campus has added a work from internationally acclaimed artist Aakash Nihalani, who is based in Brooklyn. The “trippy” sculpture is on loan from the Albright-Knox for three years – hopefully, like Shark Girl, this dynamic work of art will one day become a permanent addition to Buffalo’s public artscape.
I love this sculpture. It’s cartoonish one second and part of the farm landscape the next. It looks out of place, yet like it belongs. Any work of art that can push people to question its existence is pretty bad-ass. It’s one dimensional. But it appears to be three dimensional… from the fourth dimension. It’s a cubed-pixelated masterpiece right out of a dated video game, mashed together with Tetris. Or an episode of Family Guy in the low resolution “blocky universe” (a universe in the multiverse). The photos that I took are not renderings or mockups… this is exactly how the sculpture appears in real life.
“I’ve been working with Aaron Ott from the Albright for a while trying to find a piece that would be great in that location. They have been incredible to work with and I’m so excited it’s finally in,” said Five Points Bakery owner Kevin Gardner. “And yeah it’s trippy. It looks Photoshopped in pictures!”
This sculpture, titled Balancing Act II, is a welcome addition to the Five Points neighborhood, and should be a great draw for people looking to chill, zone out, connect, mind-bend, or whatever else this work of artwork is capable of doing to lookers-on. It’s also a nice little selfie station.
Aakash Nihalani
American, born 1986
Balancing Act II ,
Steel, aluminum, and acrylic polyurethane
108 x 96 x 2.5 inches (273.3 x 243.8 x 6.4 cm)
Gift of the artist, 2019
Five Points Bakery | 44 Brayton Street | Buffalo, NY 14213