Siberian Meteorites, Sigmar Polke
Luxury hotels that display significant artworks can get good publicity as a result – particularly if they are in a cultural destination. Park Hyatt Chicago‘s lobby displayed a Guenter Richter for a time, until it was lent to Park Hyatt Milano for its opening (it was subsequently sold). Park Hyatt Chicago had to make do with a Robert Rauschenberg collage, but that belonged to Hyatt Chairman Tom Pritzker and he then decided to loan it to his mother.
Now Park Hyatt Chicago has another really exciting painting, a 1988 work, Siberian Meteorites, by Sigmar Polke, 1941-2010, and since the hotel has a few actual meteorites on display, of course it encouraged to learn more about Siberian meteorites.
NoMi Garden, on the seventh floor
Sigmar Polke, a Capitalist Realism artist, must have been inspired by the huge Pokkamennaya Tunguska River event in northern Siberia, June 30th, 1908. They estimate that an asteroid weighing 220 million pounds entered the atmosphere at around 33,500 miles an hour and exploded at 28,000 feet, producing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs. Massive areas are still devastated to this day. The next Siberia visitation, so to speak, was February 8th, 2013, at Chelyabinsk, so obviously Polke was not thinking of that one when he painted this nine-foot-tall work. Anyway, I passed the painting on my way out from a welcome to the Windy City to lunch out on the hotel‘s seventh floor NoMi Garden. NoMi‘s chef, Take (Takeuchi Satoru) came here from Grand Hyatt Kuala Lumpur, bringing his Japanese flavours with him.
Sashimi followed by…
Somehow eating sashimi, followed by a NoMi Caesar, on such a blazing hot day, with not a breath of wind, was a lovely welcome back in town. I hear about the NoMi ambassadors, local influencers representing business, media, music, real-estate, sports and travel. More and more relationships matter in today’s the-world-is-local environment. Whom you know, and how you can spread the word further, is a key to successful marketing. I have just heard how tomorrow, Tuesday, August 11th, 2015, InterContinental Hong Kong will be hosting a live painting show by a Hamburg artist, Jeannine Platz. Working only with her hands and a spatula she will produce, in three hours, a painting of the view from that hotel’s lobby across the harbour to Hong Kong Island.
.. Caesar salad, NoMi style
She is doing similar paintings, in full view of everyone – who of course Instagram and Twitter as the painting progresses – of select views from luxury hotels, worldwide. There will be a resulting exhibition and a book, and everyone will be pleased. But back to this lovely hotel, Park Hyatt Chicago. Look up Sigmar Polke and you get straight to a myriad of mentions of this artwork, here in the hotel (though I wonder how many busy people subsequently take a momentary diversion from their travels to research Siberian meteorites?).
