I had a date with Katia after work tonight so I had to scuttle to a new thing ASAP. Thankfully this is Manhattan, so finding a great, quick experience nearby wasn’t too hard.

Madison Square Park has a new outdoor art exhibit and I wanted to see it before it started getting dark out, so after work I headed up to 23rd Street. (Of course, because I was rushing, I took the subway for three stops in the wrong direction before I noticed… shh…)

Luckily it was still light when I got there and I could marvel at Guiseppe Penone’s ‘Ideas of Stone’. As you might remember, I’ve been to a couple of exhibits here before and had mixed feelings about the last one, Red, Yellow, Blue. But this one was a real winner.

There were three sculptures and they were very simple. They involved bronze tree trunks with stripped branches that had been dotted with perfectly-placed grey rocks, which looked as if they could fall at any moment.

While I loved Buckyball back in January for its bizarre addition to the skyline, I loved this for the opposite reason – that it looked at home in the park. This meant that you could walk past just thinking it was another tree on the grass… and then double-take when you realized something wasn’t quite right.

I loved how simply it combined the idea of humans and nature; these were natural materials but they needed some messing with by man to get to this configuration. This theme continued because you couldn’t be sure exactly what had been man-made in the sculptures and what was natural. I liked.

While there, I also spied that Madison Square Eats is back but before I could grab an arrancini ball, I had to scuttle back south for that date.

Ideas of Stone is in Madison Square Park, which is at 23 Street and Fifth Avenue, until February 9, 2014.