Gediminas Urbonas’ artwork Unmelting Black (Snowman 1:1), made of Karelian black granite, was originally produced for the ARS 95 exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1995. It was situated in front of the Ateneum building, standing in a queue with other visitors to the exhibition.
The artwork was acquired by the City of Helsinki and placed in the Koulupuistikko park and later at its longterm home in Pikku-Huopalahti. During Helsinki Biennial 2025 the snowman was temporarily visiting the Esplanade Park.
Gediminas Urbonas described these earlier series of works of his – many of which were meant to be shown as public art – as ‘object archaeology’. It is a practice of excavating meaning from everyday artifacts by preserving their familiar forms while casting them into new materials, where function dissolves and objects begin to speak as fossils of lived culture, memory, and time.
With this body of work Gediminas Urbonas studies our conceptions of everyday surroundings; he extracts something from it, transmuting it into an object to see what mythical dimensions it can attain in its modified state. One of these experiments is the weather resistant black granite snowman. Seen now in a busy downtown park, it is a snowman that never melts, and instead of a pristine white snow figure, this snowman is sturdy, black, and shiny. It echoes the lost winters amid the climate change and global warming here in Northern Europe. The ‘unmelting’ snowman keeps its form and figure despite the sun and heat, while also carrying on its surface the color and shininess of petroculture.
Photo: photos: ©Helsinki Biennial / Henni Hyvarinen, Urbonas Studio
