Sculpture: Sun Life by Sorel Etrog

Sun Life is one of Sorel Etrog’s best-known sculptures, thanks to its great size and its commanding location in the centre of the plaza on the northeast corner of the busy Toronto intersection of King Street and University Avenue. The work presents a relationship between two opposing worlds: the heaviness of its rounded bottom—a “wheel of the sun” motif, which Etrog first explored in sculptures from the early 1960s—anchors the sculpture in the ground, while its vertical top, comprising geometric rectangular forms connected by a series of hinges, seems to pull the piece upward. The fifteen-tonne work measures some eight and a half metres in height, four metres in width, and is three metres deep. It is supported by a two-square-metre, two-thousand-kilogram plate buried beneath the granite paving of the plaza.