Adhaerebat Parieti 1 Sculpture

Ap Verheggen (The Netherlands; Born 1964) sculptor and filmmaker. Cultural Ambassador for UNESCO-IHE Ambassador for National Water Traineeship program Ap Verheggen graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht, with studies in architectural design. He developed a passion early on for sculpting and filmmaking, and his works began to be exhibited at prestigious art fairs such as Art Cologne and Art Basel while he was still studying at the academy. Themes of nature and movement became characteristics of his work, and his first collection of bronze fish sculptures were exhibited in Dubai. The luxury company LVMH, and in particular Moët & Chandon, recognized the uniqueness of Ap's creative style, and enlisted his talents to give inspiration to the company's designs of champagne coolers. Moët featured Ap's bronze sculptures globally to refresh the image of the company. Shell International - EPI in Rijswijk invited Ap in 2003 to build the art project "˜Terra Incognita' which became one of the largest bronze art creations ever made in the Netherlands. Ap placed seven bronze sculptures, 3.6 meters high, with the relief of the earth's spherical shape and the depth of the oceans on the concave side. After the Shell project, Ap concentrated on filming in the Arctic region of Canada to make a documentary about the native Inuit (Eskimos). He was fascinated by how these people could survive with so few resources. Since then, Ap has traveled extensively in the Arctic North: Spitsbergen, Greenland and Canada. Over the years he's witnessed that nature is undergoing extreme changes. Ap dedicated his next large art project to this phenomenon. In 2010, Ap lifted two monumental sculptures by helicopter onto a drifting iceberg in the North of Greenland to draw attention to the speed of climate change. This project, called cool(E)motion, received global media attention, and Ap released end of 2012 his documentary film about the experience, "Iceberg Riders." Inspired by the success of cool(E)motion, Ap has focused on the search for solutions in cultural adaptation to climate change. He is now exploring the possibility of building an autonomous glacier in a hot, dry desert, with the aim of inspiring innovative ways of adapting to a changing climate. He successfully conducted tests on this current project, SunGlacier, in a climate chamber together with the company GDF-Suez.