The Wall

Description

Runners participating in the Aabenraa Mountain Marathon have a sculpture they can truly relate to. The area around the start and finish line for this annual race is home to The wall, by Keld Moseholm. With warm humour, the sculpture illustrates a phenomenon many runners know from personal experience: “hitting the wall”.

Two of Keld Moseholm’s distinctive little rotund men, done in bronze, struggle to break through a slab of granite that weighs 5 tonnes. One stout fellow is seen from the back, straining to push his way into the rock, while the other runs out on the other side, upright and with his arms held up high in jubilation. Moseholm’s people do not have buff, well-trained bodies that conform to modern ideals of the perfect athlete. These little, well-fed munchkins, a recurring feature in Moseholm’s work since the 1980s, are always busy, hustling and bustling, hard at work pushing stones over an edge, or pulling each other up a sheer, vertical surface or – as here – defying every law of nature and running through a wall.

The association that organizes Aabenraa Mountain Marathon donated this sculpture to Aabenraa Municipality as a gift from the townspeople in 2009, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of this running event.