Hans Van de Bovenkamp's Gateway, a 1993 metal sculpture, rises in Oklahoma City's Myriad Botanical Gardens. This abstract artwork was dedicated on November 16, 1993, and measures approximately 16 x 15 x 5 ft. Take a breath and consider that scale: sixteen by fifteen by five feet of metal shaped and held in space.
Van de Bovenkamp's work here asks you to move around it, to change your angle and watch the relationships of line and void shift as you do. The piece's title, Gateway, invites you to imagine passing through or pausing beneath its presence, but its abstraction resists a single meaning; it offers instead an experience measured in proportion and position. As a guide, I want you to feel the deliberate human gesture in the metal — the decisions that went into a work dedicated on a November day in 1993 and set into this garden.
Stand close enough to note its scale against your body, then step back and note how it occupies the garden. Walk a slow circle and the lines and voids rearrange themselves, sixteen by fifteen by five feet of metal that never looks the same twice.