Roxy Paine has made himself known to many New York pedestrians at ground-level with his striking series of outdoor sculptures—Conjoined, Defunct and Erratic, the three elegant stainless steel tree sculptures that graced Madison Square Park in 2007, and Bluff, a 50-foot-tall stainless steel tree that stood in Central Park as part of a collaboration with the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Paine has taken it to a new level with Maelstrom, his largest work to date that will be on display on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop garden through October. With Maelstrom, the artist continues to explore tensions between order and chaos and industry and nature. The rooftop of the Met, offering its bird’s-eye view of Central Park and the city that surrounds it, could not be a more appropriate site.

An intimate show of scale models and preliminary drawings for Maelstrom and Paine’s series of other Dendroid sculptures, Dendroid Drawings and Maquettes, is currently on view at James Cohan Gallery through the end of this week.