Freedom is a bronze public sculpture in the form of a large slab and a freestanding statue by sculptor Zenos Frudakis. The sculpture invites viewers to pose for a photograph in an empty cavity. When it was installed in 2001, tit was on the facade of the HQ of GlaxoSmithKline; the building is now a charter school.
The sculptor says it represents freedom from all restrictions: mental, political, religious, and physical and has been called a “visual metaphor for the process of transformation”. There are depictions of twenty-five people and a cat in the bronze background. It is said to be influences by Rodin’s Gates of Hell. (One of the casts of the Gates of Hell is in Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum.}
Frudakis wrote, “Although there are four figures represented, the work is really one figure moving from left to right. The composition develops from left to right beginning with a kind of mummy/death like captive figure locked into its background. In the second frame, the figure, reminiscent of Michaelangelo’s Rebellious Slave, begins to stir and struggle to escape. The figure in the third frame has torn himself from the wall that held him captive and is stepping out, reaching for freedom. In the fourth frame, the figure is entirely free, victorious, arms outstretched, completely away from the wall and from the grave space he left behind. He evokes an escape from his own mortality.”
