With [sculpture trail], Luxembourg Art Week brings together a selection of works and installations presented in open air. Their placement traces a route through the city, inviting encounters with art along the streets, in everyday journeys and places.
[sculpture trail] benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
Gilles Pegel
Fork, 2026
Two CNC induction bent stainless steel tubes, custom powdercoated BMX frame (race pink)
Dimensions: approx. 270 × 110 × 70 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Lieu
Pont Adolphe (at the intersection of avenue Marie-Thérèse and place de Bruxelles)
Luxembourg
Fork (ROTM) brings together two engineered structures: two large stainless steel helices and a race-pink BMX frame. The helices emerge from the ground and disappear into it again, as if only a fragment of a larger system had become visible.
Their geometry refers to the phenomenon of helical perversion, described by Charles Darwin in 1865. In certain climbing plants, a spiral unexpectedly reverses its direction before continuing its growth. Pegel has returned to this structural anomaly for many years, using it as a model for mutation, adapta- tion and moments when an established order changes course without collapsing.
The work was first conceived in 2021 and originally installed in a rural landscape. There, the polished steel appeared almost foreign, a technological structure interrupting nature. Reworked for an urban context in 2026, the same material takes on a different role. Stainless steel tubing is part of the every-day language of contemporary cities, used for handrails, barriers, bicycle racks and countless pieces of infrastructure. What looked alien in a field can almost disappear into the city.
This shift is also temporal. In 2021, artificial intelligence and increasingly autonomous technological systems still felt comparatively speculative. Today they are embedded in everyday life. AI is not the subject of the sculpture, but one visible example of a broader interest in systems that evolve, adapt and begin to operate according to logics that exceed their original design.
The BMX frame pushes this ambiguity further. One helix passes directly through the frame, making it physically inseparable from the sculpture. At first glance, it can resemble the familiar sight of a bicycle frame locked to urban furniture. Only on closer inspection does the situation become impossible: the frame was never attached afterwards. It is trapped inside the structure and has become part of it.
Both elements are highly engineered forms. The helices are digitally modelled and produced through CNC induction bending, a process more commonly associated with industrial engineering than sculpture. The BMX frame is another structure shaped by efficiency, movement and precise geometry. Their encounter turns two functional languages into a single sculptural system.
The title Fork reflects this idea of divergence. In computing, a fork describes a system splitting into anew line of development. In blockchain technology, a hard fork creates a permanent divergence. The word also belongs to the vocabulary of cycling. Across these meanings, the same principle remains: continuity is maintained, but direction changes.
Fork (ROTM) sits deliberately between sculpture and infrastructure, between contemplation and use. It belongs to the city while subtly interrupting its logic.
Discover the ART WALK by downloading the map here.
