CLIMAX, specially commissioned by Hydro for the Nobel Peace Center, is made entirely from reclaimed aluminium chosen by the artist at a recycling plant in Norway.
Magne Furuholmen (born 1962), has been active as an artist for more than a decade, with works in collections and exhibitions around the world. Perhaps known best as the guitar and keyboard player in the pop group a-ha, Furuholmen is a multi-layered artist working in a variety of media, including paintings, ceramics, glass, prints, video, and performance art.
The unveiling makes for a fitting partnership between the environmentally aware artist and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who has made it his mission to bring climate change to the world’s attention, including through the film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Furuholmen has this to say about Al Gore: “It takes a brave man to walk away from the most wanted seat of power in the world, to make a life out of saying what no one really wants to hear. That is what Al Gore has done, and now he gets the Peace Prize. Great for him! But it’s too bad for us for needing all the world’s alarm clocks to ring so loudly before waking up. The world certainly needs people like Al Gore to remind us of our obligations to future generations.”
Furuholmen chose aluminium for CLIMAX for the environmental message it sends.
“Aluminium has helped us build the world as we know it, and it continues to make the world a smaller, more promising place,” he says. “The material tells its story of former industrial existence – both beneficial and problematic to us – and of its butterfly journey from scrap to yet another new life.
“And it is the most recyclable industrial metal on the planet.”
In fact, the artist welcomes the idea of recycling further by inviting the next artist to be commissioned by the Nobel Peace Center to use his work as raw material for a new sculpture. He rejects the idea of his sculpture as a permanent installation, pointing to the material’s inherent qualities of transformation and renewal.
“CLIMAX is a sculpture that represents this moment in time,” Furholmen says. “Is it too late? Are we in time to save ourselves?”
: 7 December 2007