Portal

In Hagen Park, you can walk through Calevi Tenhovaara’s Portal. A stone’s throw away, another work from the artist, Lekbänk (Play Bench), points out a straight line through the portal. In the works, sculpture meets nature and ancient architecture. Together, the two sculptures form a suggestive room in the park. Do they bear some Stonehenge-like secret? Are they some sort of giant sundial?

The entire Hagen area was laid out before the Bo92 housing fair held in Örebro in 1992. The municipality invested right from the start in an extensive artistic embellishment of the park, with six sculptures by Tenhovaara and three by Richard Brixel – all installed in 1992.

In addition to Portal and Play Bench, Tenhovaara’s sculptures Flytande stenar (Floating Stones), Båtköl (Boat Keel), Sittplats (Seat) and Högsäte (Seat of Honour) are also located in the park. These are sculptures that both invite and create places for contemplation. Sculpture almost always offers something for the eye, but the rough stones in several of Tenhovaara’s works also invite touch, and Play Bench, Seat and Seat of Honour welcome visitors of all sizes to take a seat. The titles set the imagination on fire. Test them out to see if it feels different to sit in the seat of honour than it does in the regular seat.

Calevi Tenhovaara was born in 1940 in Tampere, Finland and settled down in Sweden after studying abroad, including in Germany, Norway and Denmark. He lived in Karlstad and died in 2009. He was a trained gemstone worker and silversmith and a self-taught artist. As such, he had a penchant for natural shapes and materials, and he worked in both large and small formats.