Race to save Cornelia Parker’s Met sculpture

Cornelia Parker’s PsychoBarn on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s roof. Photo: courtesy of Frith Street Gallery

Time is running out to save a large sculpture by the UK artist Cornelia Parker from ending up in a New York skip. Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), which the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned earlier this year as a temporary, site-specific piece for its roof, has only weeks to find a permanent home, despite being offered as a gift to several US institutions. “It closes on Halloween—so appropriate. I think it will be taken down on 12 November,” Parker says. “We have had people interested, but these things take time, which we don’t have.” Jane Hamlyn of Frith Street Gallery, which is showing Parker’s work at Frieze, says: “We are desperate for it to go to the right institution or collection.”

Parker reused wood from a barn in upstate New York to evoke Norman Bates’s mansion from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho, itself inspired by Edward Hopper’s paintings. Red barns were a European import and Hitchcock a Londoner, so the sculpture is a “moveable feast; it can travel with its psychological baggage”, the artist says. It could be resited on a roof, hilltop or become an indoor work.

The sculpture has been seen by __more than 500,000 visitors to the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden since it was unveiled in April (until 31 October). "The Met would be pleased to see PsychoBarn have a life beyond the Cantor Roof Garden," says a spokeswoman for the museum.

• Cornelia Parker takes part in a Frieze Masters Talk, Sunday 9 October, 12pm-1pm