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Et Purus No. 2

In January 2024, His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden, honored Et Purus No.2 with a site on Djurgården, his Royal Island in Stockholm. Nine months later, on September 11, HM honored Professor Arne Ljungqvist’s fifty-year fight against performance-enhancing drugs and pulled the black cover strings to unveil Et Purus No. 2 to the cheering of a large crowd consisting of members of the Royal family, Cabinet Ministers, and many of the Swedish media.

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The identical hand, on a totally different sculpted base, shares two important architectural features with Et Purus No.1: a circular base in a horizontal orientation that narrows towards the top, and a height of 3 feet, which maintains the same relationship to the 7-foot-tall hand. But in this confinement of similarity, the two were quite different.  While the base in Monaco is a portion of a ball, which represents the Northern Hemisphere of the globe, the base of the monument in Djurgården Island is a frustum, which in essence is a circular slope that is joined at the bottom and at the top with two round flat circles of different diameters. The change is significant: the installation of the Monaco hand on the upper tip of a ball’s curve, led to having a sense of tension. Such tension reflects on the struggle that undoubtedly is present in keeping clean in a world that is infected by performance-enhancing drugs. The wider, flatter top of the upper base on Djurgården Island provides the winning gesture with an elegant space and a greater sense of power.  Aside from the gold lettering of the inscriptions, which circle the slope's perimeter near the top, the base is clean of any other information. As such, it is a far cry from the realistic geographic relief that covers the base of Et Purus No. 1. This gives Et Purus No. 2 a cleaner, more contemporary power, merging its quiet elegance with the surrounding vista of the site.

2. Et Purus No. 2 - His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden, unveils Et Purus No. 2 on Djurgården, the Royal Island, September 11, 2024.jpg

His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden, unveils Et Purus No. 2 on Djurgården, the Royal Island, September 11, 2024

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Bjorn Bertoft, His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden, Professor Arne Llungqvist in conversation with the artist at the unveiling of Et Purus No. 2 in Stockholm

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