From Stone to Life: Explore Granite Sculpture "Pig"

Teodors Zaļkalns (1937) is one of the founders of the Latvian national school of sculpture. He particularly stands out among other sculptors with the amount of interest he devoted to portraying animals.

The animals he depicted included a lamb, a rabbit and a cat, it is his granite pig that has become a veritable queen of animals in Latvian sculpture. 

Its compact density and clarity of form make this work an outstanding example of granite sculpture. 

Zaļkalns envisioned cutting one of these from an enormous block of light grey Finnish granite and placing it in the Central Market in Riga.

Zaļkalns did not succeed in finding a sufficiently large piece of rock or assistants to carry out his most ambitious project in public space.