Väggutsmyckning (Wall Decoration)

Vasatunneln may not be a place we usually stop and take a closer look at, but a large-scale artistic embellishment is tucked away here. Perhaps you’ve seen the big sheet-metal shapes on the tunnel walls? A pointing triangle at each end of the tunnel indicates the directions of pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and between these, walking legs mingle with abstract shapes.

But have you noticed the images carved in the concrete sections of the walls? These show fragments of street life, with pedestrians, cars, bicycles and dogs out and about. We can watch scenes from people’s lives through their apartment windows and in one image, we see someone with a trowel bricking up a wall. Maybe it’s the tunnel itself under completion.

“A mirror of traffic in the tunnel for pedestrians and cyclists as well as a reminder of the former crossing traffic over the railway with its often-lowered barriers.” This is how the artist Stig Ghylfe himself described his decoration of Vasatunneln. Ghylfe was born in 1925 in Hudiksvall. He studied at Konstfackskolan in Stockholm and made art trips to Paris and Munich, but in the 1960s moved first to Nora and then to the Örebro area. He died in 2000 in Örebro.

Sheet metal reliefs and concrete engravings were not Ghylfe’s primary medium. Instead, he usually worked with enamelled glass. He acquired his own kiln, which he and other artists could use to fire the hard glass mass.

Please stop and have a look at the engravings, but watch out for cyclists, who can race by at high speeds on the bike path!