Jonathan Borofsky

A sculptor, painter, and draughtsman, Jonathan Borofsky has explored in his work subjects as varied as dreams, labor, and the boundaries between life and art. At the core of his practice is his ongoing seres, “Counting” (1969–), a serial project comprised of a stack of graph paper sheets on which the artist writes consecutive numbers (1 to well over 3,000,000 today) in pencil and ink. Intending to count from one to infinity, Borofsky initially counted for hours every day. However, Borofsky is even better known for his “Hammering Man”, who appears in both two- and three-dimensional works and exists as monumental public sculptures all over the world, most notably in Seoul, Frankfurt, and Seattle. The steel sculptures include a motorized arm that hammers silently four times per minute through daylight hours, except on Labor Day, when the figure remains still. “At its heart, society reveres the worker. The Hammering Man is the worker in all of us,” Borofsky has said of the piece.