Magne F commissioned to create sculpture for the Nobel Peace Center

This afternoon, Nobel Prize Award winners Al Gore and Rajendra Kumar Pachauri unveiled Magne’s new aluminum sculpture, ‘Climax.’ The unveiling took place at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. Hydro commissioned the sculpture with the only stipulation being that it had to be made out of aluminum, a material Magne had never worked with before.

Before taking the commission from Hydro to create the sculpture, Magne spent some time considering the theme of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize award as well as the properties of aluminum. In an article on the Hydro website, Magne says,

“I think we are living at time when there is a delicate balance, and in a time of major change, regardless of whether it is we ourselves or the sun that is responsible for our environmental problems. I started working on the title before I knew what I was going to make. I tried to find words that describe the situation we’re in and I came up with the concept of “Climax”. It means ladder in Greek. Apart from its use as term in drama, and its erotic connotations, the word is also used rhetorically by Gore and ecologists to describe an ecosystem strained to the maximum.”

Having hit upon the concept of a house of cards, Magne gathered materials from a variety of sources, including defunct planes, retired tankers and traffic signs. Rather than smelting or recycling the materials prior to creating the sculpture, Magne used the plates immediately after cutting them out of their original context - left as they were found.

The 4m high ‘Climax’ will be on display in the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo through the spring, and Magne has said that the materials can then be recycled by other artists, to continue the process.

In a related project, Paul Stolper is pleased to announce the launch of ‘CLIMAX CARDGAME’ by Magne F; a set of 15 aluminium cards, each engraved with text on one side and image on the other. This edition coincides with, and is the companion piece to ‘CLIMAX’, a large sculpture made from reclaimed aluminium, commissioned by the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, Norway 2007 and unveiled on the 11th of December by honourable Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore.

For further information visit Magne’s official art site or sign up for his mailing list.

Nobel Peace Prize Youtube site | VG | Budstikka (1) | Budstikka (2) | About the unveiling