She Lies

She Lies floats on the fjord directly in front of the Oslo Opera House, a mass of stainless steel and glass panels. The sculpture measures roughly seventeen metres long and sixteen wide, riding a concrete platform anchored to the harbour floor. It rises twelve metres above the water, an iceberg that drifted into the city and stayed.

Monica Bonvicini won the international competition for the piece in 2007. Her starting point was Caspar David Friedrich's painting The Sea of Ice, a nineteenth-century image of ice floes piled into a peak. In her version, global warming has set the iceberg loose here, stranding it among the buildings. She wanted the work to probe the connection between nature and culture. It has held its berth since 2010, commissioned as public art for the redeveloped Bjørvika waterfront. Steel beams hold the shape together with a hint of ruin, while the glass skin mirrors everything around it. In some lights the surfaces seem to glow, and in others you look straight through them.

The anchor holds, but the water never lets the work rest. Tide and wind turn it slowly on its moorings through the day. Bonvicini has spoken of a permanent state of change, a sculpture that never repeats itself. The sharpest view comes from the opera house roof, where you look down on how it sits in the fjord.