Emigranterna

In Sweden, Emigranterna presents seven bronze emigrants seated on the broad back of an oversized fish. Green patina catches the light across their shoulders and faces, while open spaces between the figures let the wind pass through. Carl Milles created the group in 1940, shaping a strange vessel around faces, coats, bent backs and waiting hands.

The fish carries the travellers like a mythic hull, with smoothed scales and a mouth beneath their weight. Several original casts exist, giving the sculpture a tangled history across different places. One cast left an institute to raise funds, then a private gallerist placed it in public view. Bronze now gathers fingerprints and small marks around gestures such as a hand pressed to a brow or two heads inclined together. Milles’s political sympathies during the 1930s also complicate this image of migration, departure and companionship. Seven people sit without visible land beneath them, held together by one fish and the silence of an unseen sea.