Get an Early Peek at Winter With This Touring Snowman Sculpture

Fall’s nearly here, but winter-loving art fans can still get an early taste of their favorite season by checking out Snowman, according to artnet News. The playfully “frozen” sculpture is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, on a sunny terrace, until October 15, 2017. After that, it's slated to make stops at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Created by Peter Fischli and the late artist David Weiss, who passed away in 2012, the frosty installation is encased inside a nearly 7-foot tall vitrine, with an extension cord plugged into the wall. Technically, it isn't a bona fide snowman: “A copper snowman is used as a base, and filled with cooler liquid, and the box is filled with humidity and builds out after four or five days," Fischli explained to The New Yorker. Still, it looks enough like a wintry backyard creation to pass for the real thing.

Not that the piece is intended to be nostalgic. According to the Art Institute, the warm-weather snowman—which was originally created in the late '80s to stand in front of a German power plant, which in turn powered the glass display case—was designed to "confuse hierarchies and values by creating systems doomed to fail," DNAinfo writes. We can't think of a better way to snap out of our pumpkin spice spells.