Et Purus No. 2: Djurgården, Stockholm.
In January 2025, His Majety Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden honored Et Purus No. 2 with a site on D’jurgården, his Royal Island in Stockholm. Nine months later, on September 11, HM honored Professor Arne Ljungqvist’s fifty-years fight against performance enhancing drugs, pulled the black cover strings and unveiled Et Purus No. 2 to the cheering of a large crowd consisting of members of the Royal family, Cabinet’s Ministers and many of the Swedish media.
The identical hand, on a totally different sculpted base, shares two important architectural features with Et Purus No.1: a circular base of a horizontal orientation, which narrows towards the top, and a height of 3-feet, which keeps 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 North hemisphere of the globe, the base of the monument in D’jurgården 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 enhancement performing drugs. The wider and flatter top of the upper base on D’jurgården 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 periphery of the slope near the top, the base is clean of any other information, and 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.