#public-art

According to the city's tourism site, this one was commissioned by the shopping centre it's balanced on, taking its cue from all the ice cream stands doing business on the street below. Apparently the tilted tip was meant to echo the church spires on the skyline nearby — a mall dressed up, half-jokingly, as a cathedral of consumption.

These seven panels are said to be for each of the seven towns this one is twinned with — a crest and a scrap of scenery for each. According to Wikipedia it's one of half a dozen bits of public art round the same town centre, so somebody there was on a mission at some point. I couldn't find out whose idea it was.

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.

It's glazed tile set into the brickwork rather than paint, which is presumably how it's held up outdoors this long. I couldn't find much beyond that — not even why it's on this wall and not another. If anyone knows, I'd like the story.

From what I could find, the way he works is to have a big block of granite quarried and split, then stand it back up with the drill marks left in plain sight — you're meant to be able to tell it was taken apart and put together again. This one sits outdoors in Switzerland. I couldn't find out who asked for it, or why it got the name it did.

It's apparently 5.5 tons of wood and about 12 metres tall, built with a carpenter's help rather than just designed and handed off to a factory.

This one belongs to a scheme from the nineties, from what I can tell — a Norwegian county paying for a sculpture in every one of its municipalities and putting them out in the landscape rather than in a gallery. The Latin on it is the old naming of the winds. Whether it does anything you can hear when the weather turns, I couldn't find out.

This isn't painted at all — it's ceramic tile, fired in pieces and fixed to the front, which is how it's survived decades outdoors. I couldn't find out who decided the building needed one.

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.

They say he painted a lot of these big public murals around Brazil — I couldn't track down the specific story behind this one, but it hangs in a government building in Minas Gerais.

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.

Stacked steel like this was a bit of a signature of his — there are related ones standing in a few Australian cities, from what I can find. Not much else about this particular one.

Not much comes up searching for this one — it's just been fixed to that wall a long while. Judging by some other pictures it's huge.

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.

The outfit behind this has apparently done hundreds of painted walls, mostly around France, and the trick is always the same: a blank gable end dressed up as a building that isn't there, with people leaning out of it. They say the figures are usually locals, or names the area is known for.

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.

I couldn't find much backstory on this one — the title apparently translates to 'Spiral of Time,' which tracks given the twist running up the steel.

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.

According to Wikipedia, the man who made it ended up in London after surviving a Soviet labour camp, and spent the rest of his life doing huge ceramic walls like this one. This is just one panel — the whole thing runs along what used to be the civic centre in Peckham, telling the story of one road. They say it's protected now, so it stays even though the building's changed hands.