At the height of his fame, the artist created the outdoor sculpture *The Burning Pietà* at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark in 1972. He then travelled to Sweden, where he already had several friends and was increasingly highly regarded. For several years now, he had been experimenting with earth-based forms, cement castings in the ground, and burning sculptures.

“Concrete, set in the earth and stretched across iron scaffolding, presents a challenge to the sculptor, who, in his volcanic exuberance, has once again yearned for an ascetic, unambiguous expression. The ‘Sebastians’ series, forming a multi-figure memorial to the hostages shot in Nowy Sącz, represented Polish art at the 1st Biennale of Outdoor Sculpture in Montevideo in 1969, whilst ‘Against War’ in front of the Polish pavilion at the 35th Venice Biennale. Using the same technique, Hasior subsequently created the sculpture “Burning Pietà” in Denmark and unleashed the frisky herd of horses from “The Sun Chariot” in Södertalje near Stockholm”

(Anna Micińska, 1977)

Hasior himself recalled that the director of the cultural centre in Södertalje, Eje Hogestatt, had initially wanted to commission a group modelled precisely on the monument to those executed by firing squad. “I refused, proposing another, earlier idea: Pegasus horses. (...) They ‘run’ across a pine-covered hill, beside the canal through which ships enter the harbour. They are visible from afar: from the water they are silvery-white, from the land – reddish-brown. I made them in the same way as my previous monumental compositions – set in the ground, from reinforced concrete. I even managed to solve the problem of their precarious stability on my own (...) The composition is held together by this ‘solar chariot’, drawn with a line of white cement on the hillside. I was inspired here by drawings from the Viking Age which, to this day, mysteriously adorn the great boulders of Scandinavia” (statement from 1974). This final element of the group has not survived, nor has the original colour scheme of the figures or the small concrete dome, approximately 1 m in diameter, symbolising the sun. The group of eight horse figures is spaced several to over a dozen metres apart on the slope; each figure is up to 7 metres long, with the tallest standing 8 metres high.

The sculptures have troughs on their backs, intended to hold a flammable substance – used during events involving fire (such poetry evenings took place in June in the 1970s, the last one in 1986 on the 10th anniversary of the group’s inauguration).