22. Stabil

ARTIST: Lars Englund (2000)
TECHNIQUE: Aluminium

If you are interested in the art in Kumla, then you will recognize the name Lars Englund. He is the man behind the sculpture Complications in central town. When sculpting Englund uses forms from nature, geometry or human physics. Often they are put together of small elements that reach up into space. He often works with metal. That is something you can see in both Complications and in the work entitled Stabile that you will now hear about.

At first sight Stabile does not seem to be anything special. One piece of advice though is to walk around the sculpture a couple of times. Notice how Englund has constructed the sculpture as a self-supporting structure that will withstand the strong winds up on the mount.

Sometimes when the wind howls at maximum, Stabile starts to vibrate. Then it can even produce sound waves in certain wind directions. It sings a fundamental tone that is nature´s own. Material and shape here form a structure that partly is a tautly beautiful body, but also a mathematical principal transformed into practice. On the mount the metal is turned into something else than non-living material. It acts dynamically with its surroundings and is called back to life.

Lars Englund was born in Stockholm in 1933 and is a Swedish graphic artist and sculptor. He was trained at Fernand Léger´s School in Paris and The Little Pavillion in Stockholm. Englund has created non-figurative works as well as experiments with different materials such as plastic, aluminium, coal fibre and steel. Often his works are composed of basic shapes like spheres and circles.

Some examples of his public works are Electrum in Stockholm, Concrete Cells in Örebro, Enamel Wall in Umeå and of course Complications here in Kumla. In addition, he is represented at the National Musem and the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm.

Lars Englund is one of the great sculptors in Sweden. He started out in minimalism, a school of art from the 60s and 70s. In 2000 he gained much attention from his exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. That exhibit also consisted of ingenious basic forms combined into complex constructions.

Perhaps it is exactly the stylistically pure that we appreciate in Englund´s work. That is what we find in Stabile. The material is aluminium profiles. Here Englund has succeeded in luring new qualities out of something that is otherwise a common basic component. Do observe the angles of the work. They straggle and stretch up. Does it not look in fact as if it is moving?