Krzesło, Wrocław

Krzesło is an outdoor sculpture by Tadeusz Kantor, rising where Rzeźnicza Street meets Nowy Świat. Its familiar garden-chair shape becomes startling at this scale: the work is nine metres high, built from smooth concrete, and weighs roughly eight tonnes. Kantor wanted sculpture to remain part of everyday movement rather than sit apart on a pedestal, so this busy junction is essential to the idea.

He called the design an “impossible monument.” The project began as a proposal for the Wrocław ’70 symposium, which invited artists to devise works for public space. The authorities promised to realise it, but the structure was not built then. It finally appeared on 11 August 2011, based on Kantor’s original drawing, with the design developed by architect Tomasz Myczkowski and Dorota Krakowska, who inherited Kantor’s copyright.