#bronze

Apparently it stands for the twin-town friendship between Turku and Gothenburg, and there are two of them — the original in one city and a copy in the other. You'll come across this one by the market square at Puutori.

It came out of a huge doorway commission — bronze doors for a museum that was never actually built, so they never got hung anywhere. He kept picking at that project for decades and casting single figures out of it along the way, and this is one of those. The debt to Michelangelo is one he apparently never bothered to hide.

Milles spent a big chunk of his career teaching sculpture in Michigan, so a lot of his best-known fountains are actually in the US, not here.

As the story goes, the original version of this dog was stolen right off this same spot, and what's standing here now is the replacement. According to Wikipedia, it's also one of only two standalone sculptures in the whole square.

According to Wikipedia it's the tallest bronze Gandhi anywhere, put up by the state government at a cost of about 35 crore rupees — which, whatever the exchange rate, is a serious pile of money.

It's Orpheus, the one whose music could raise the dead — the figures around him are supposed to be souls pulled up by the sound. It stands right outside the concert hall, so the joke, if it is one, was on purpose.

According to Wikipedia it honours Sweden's first Social Democratic prime minister — five metres tall, six wide, a whole rally cast in bronze with him mid-speech at the front.

Apparently he sculpted this one back in the 1990s but it never got cast until 2024, using a small maquette he'd given years earlier to someone who lived nearby. When it finally went up, the story got messier — a descendant of the writer it depicts called it 'hideous' in the press. Not everyone locally seems thrilled either.

Statues like this apparently went up in Catholic villages all over the Low Countries between the wars — whole parishes would chip in to get their own. This one puts locals in the scene too: a farmer with his spade on one side, a mother with her child on the other.

According to what I've picked up, Paolozzi was part of the London scene often credited with helping Pop art get going in the 1950s, years before Warhol picked up the idea over in the US. By the time he made this one, he'd moved into these heavy, machine-part-looking bronzes — a shift from collage to hard metal that a lot of the writing treats as its own turning point for him.

He kept going back to the same reclining woman for something like fifty years — dozens of versions, and most of them cast more than once, which is why so many cities ended up with one. Apparently this is one of the late ones, made when he was in his eighties and running what was effectively a small factory.

She's out in the river to mark some old public swimming baths that stood nearby, according to Wikipedia. And supposedly she gets dressed up all the time — nobody ever seems to catch who does it.

This is Hercules mid-shot at some monstrous man-eating birds, one of his mythical labours, though you'd never guess it without being told — no birds or arrows in sight. They say the model was a soldier friend who didn't want to be recognizable, so his face got smoothed out in later casts. He was killed at Verdun a few years after posing.

The title apparently means the crater a volcano leaves behind. Why there's one sat in the middle of a square I couldn't work out — if anyone knows the story, I'd love it.

Helvetia is the woman who turns up on Swiss coins — a stand-in for the country, like Britannia. The idea here, from what I've read, is that she's climbed down off the coin and gone travelling: shield set aside, spear down, suitcase packed. You'll come across her on the embankment in Kleinbasel.

He made the same reclining shape over and over for something like fifty years. Apparently they were cast in editions too, so this isn't the only one of it — versions of the same thing sit in a few different countries.

The Latin title translates to something like 'from the greatest to the least' — apparently the idea was to move from huge industrial machinery down to the smallest particles of matter, all packed into one bronze. It's set right by a glasshouse full of tropical plants, an odd pairing that might be the whole point. By this stage he'd moved a long way from the collage aesthetic that got him called the godfather of Pop Art — this is all cast gears and blocky machine parts instead.

You'll come across this sat out on the grass on the Promenade de l'Observatoire, close enough to lean on. From what I've read he wanted them outdoors on purpose — weather, sky, people climbing about — and pushed for that whenever he had a say in where one ended up.

They say Cork nicknamed this pair almost as soon as they went up, and that's still what most people call them, whatever the official title says.

He led the big Dublin workers' strikes back in 1913, and they say the pose comes straight from photos of him speaking to crowds. Apparently the stone underneath carries his line about the great only looking great because the rest of us are on our knees.