helter skelter

Phyllida Barlow, helter skelter, is the new cover commission for the 33^rd edition of the pocket Tube map series commissioned by Art on the Underground, for Transport for London.

Made in lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic helter skelter is a new work on paper that marks the instability of our time. Comprised of Barlow’s signature bold colours and shapes, helter skelter is a tower of platforms and tubes balanced precariously on top of one another, on the brink of collapse.

The ramp, the barrier and the tower are forms that have appeared repeatedly in Barlow’s work throughout her 50-year career and are reflected here in an array of pink, blue, purple, orange and red colours in acrylic and pencil on paper. Barlow is captivated by the idea of being both physically and metaphorically on the edge of breaking. How things collapse, deteriorate and are then repaired forms a central tenet of the work which the artist sees as a great metaphor for the human condition and our current time.

helter skelter mimics the Underground architecture with an energy and urgency much celebrated in Barlow’s wider practice. Renowned for sculpture as well as works on paper, Barlow’s practice encourages us to experience her work physically. There is an expediency to how she works both on paper and via the materials she uses in her sculptures. Recycled timbre, scree, concrete, plaster, polystyrene and expanding foam create unapologetic, adventurous and gigantic gargantuan forms. Her works recontextualise and displace objects, rendering them useless and absurd. Looking at the city is an important source of inspiration for these works and drawing, a method for realising these ideas.

Barlow is interested in opposites in her work – thrilling but dangerous, towering and precarious – as a metaphor for how we live. She allows us to experience both the precarity and absurdity of the world with a great humour and pathos that couldn’t feel more timely.

Fantasías

Fantasías by Elisabeth Wild is a new collage artwork made for the cover of London Underground’s iconic pocket Tube map. The 32^nd in a series commissioned since 2003, Wild joins a roster of leading international artists who have made work for this site including Linder, Laure Prouvost, Geta Bratescu, Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Barbara Kruger.

The Tube map cover is the final commission by Wild before her recent passing in February 2020 and forms part of the artist’s long-standing collage series Fantasías. Established out of a daily practice, each work in the series is made from the pages of glossy lifestyle, fashion, architecture and art magazines where Wild would identify forms and colours that she cut with scissors and reconstituted into new abstract compositions. She worked from an archive of these cuttings, using her glue stick to layer shapes and a multitude of colours. To Wild, the process of perfecting her collages was an intuitive act. She avoided direct reference to the consumer objects from the pages, cutting her own shapes, turning the advertisements from images of extravagance into imagined objects, architectures or cityscapes in their own right.

For the Tube map cover, the influence of Graphic Modernism and Constructivism are present – lines run vertically, horizontally and intersect to make geometric shapes that form a tower-like structure. The edges of these small shapes are irregular and angular and at times placed just off-kilter, a reminder of Wild’s 98 year old hand.  The resulting artwork is an imagined monument in London Underground’s infamous blue and red palette. For Wild that millions of these maps will be printed and distributed throughout London was thrilling and a small nod to the Constructivists who believed passionately in the translation of ideas and design into mass production, out of the artist’s studio and into the hands of millions.

Pleasure’s Inaccuracies

In 2020, Art on the Underground presented a large-scale public commission of permanent and temporary artworks by Scottish-born, Belgium-based artist Lucy McKenzie, titled Pleasure’s Inaccuracies.

McKenzie is fascinated by the decoration of public spaces such as train stations, and her work frequently combines source material from the realms of historical design, advertising and architecture. For what was her most ambitious public commission to date, she chose Sudbury Town Tube station, a historic, listed building designed by Charles Holden in 1931, for its location and architecture. Situated outside of central London, with a cavernous main hall, original features and waiting rooms on each platform, the station is evocative of another era. 

By respecting Sudbury Town’s original design, McKenzie’s commission reflects the present through the aesthetics of the past. The commission comprised a number of elements: two permanent hand-painted ceiling murals featuring maps of the local area; a highly detailed architectural model of the station which will remain on permanent display; two large billboards installed on each platform; and a series of posters which was on display until April 2022.

Morden

For the 31st edition of the Pocket Tube map, Art on the Underground have commissioned a new work by Welsh artist Bedwyr Williams. As the UK approach leaving the European Union and move towards an uncertain future, this commission is part of a year-long programme which brings together international artists to explore the emotional weight of longing and belonging to the city as it crosses this edge.

Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset

Art on the Underground commissioned artist Alexandre da Cunha to create a permanent artwork for the Northern Line Extension. Da Cunha’s work is installed at the new Underground station at Battersea Power Station, which opened on 20 September 2021.

‘Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset’ is a monumental kinetic sculpture reflecting on daily cycles. Stretching 100m and 60m in length, the artwork incorporates two friezes that face each other along the length of the ticket hall. Made using an outdated advertising mechanism – the rotating billboard – Alexandre da Cunha has created a moving sculpture. The artwork was inspired by the former control room at Battersea Power Station and its system of vertical bars that regulated the production and output of electricity into the city. Bringing these resonances together with the daily flow of dawn to dusk, Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset refers to cycles, routine, the everyday and eternity.

The friezes consist of three faces of different colours, gradually fading from one colour to another over the length of the entire panel. The colours are informed by London sunsets and sunrises. Throughout the course of the day the panels rotate, seemingly at random, presenting different combinations of colours into the ticket hall. The long strip of gradient colours creates an illusion of a large window to a dramatic sky.

The three words of the title refer to the three faces of the vertical panels, their cyclical rotation and repetition. With over 3,500 individual colour panels, Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset creates an ever-changing environment within the station.

Brixton Blue

Art on the Underground commissioned Grenada-born, British artist Denzil Forrester to create a large-scale public artwork for Brixton station, on view from 19 September 2019 until Spring 2021.

Forrester is the third commission in a new series at Brixton, following on from Njideka Akunyili Crosby in 2018 and Aliza Nisenbaum in 2019. The programme selects artists to respond to the diverse narratives of the murals from the 1980s, the rapid development of the area and the wider social and political history of mural making.

For his first major UK public commission, Forrester has reinterpreted his seminal work ‘Three Wicked Men’ (1982), now in the collection of Tate, London, into an immersive, large-scale painting. Made during his time at the Royal College of Art, Forrester has returned to ‘Three Wicked Men’ several times over the decades. The title was borrowed from a track by Reggae George, released a year earlier, in which Forrester identifies the three men as a policeman, a politician and a businessman. In Forrester’s painted versions, the latter figure is often replaced by a Rasta. Reflective of the contemporary black experience and the racial tensions of the time, the painting features Winston Rose; a friend of Forrester’s who died whilst under police restraint in 1981 and which would continue to haunt many of his paintings for the next decade.

You are deeper than what you think

‘You are deeper than what you think’ by Laure Prouvost is the artist’s first public commission in the UK, an ambitious city-wide series of posters infiltrating advertising sites across all 270 London Underground stations.

Prouvost has created posters in print, for digital screens and the cover of six million pocket Tube maps as well as major installations at Heathrow and Stratford stations that bookend the project from east to west London. In these sites the artist draws on her own tradition of sign-painting alongside London Underground’s early history of wayfinding and graphic design, where signs were produced by hand. Each poster is a digital reproduction of a hand-painted sign complete with a sentence devised specifically for the Underground in its iconic Johnston typeface, with corporate logos painted too.

Synonymous with Prouvost’s distinctly playful and poetic voice where English is her second language, the crux of the project begins with the poster ‘you are deeper than what you think’, an interplay between the literal place the work will be encountered and a reminder that there is more inside all of us than we might initially feel. Further works include ‘oh stay with us the party has just begun’ that fills the atrium at Heathrow station and ‘ideally these words would pause everything now’ a 20 metre sign at Stratford station that directly addresses the millions of passengers who commute through Stratford station each day.

London Underground: Brixton Station and Victoria Line Staff

The second in a new series of commissions for Brixton Underground station, Art on the Underground presented a large-scale public artwork by Mexican-born and New York-based artist Aliza Nisenbaum, on view from April – September 2019.

The work is the first public UK commission by Nisenbaum who used the Brixton murals from the 1980s as inspiration. As we approached the prospect of the UK leaving the European Union, a defining moment for the UK against a backdrop of worldwide geopolitical change, this commission formed part of Art on the Underground’s 2019 programme which looked at the role artists can play in drawing out ideas of future utopias of togetherness and belonging.

Influenced by the Mexican mural movement and its depiction of social history, Nisenbaum’s work probes the politics of representation by bringing overlooked groups of people together in exquisitely painted portraits. She continued this practice for her commission where she was artist-in-residence, living and working in Brixton for three months. Through an open call, Nisenbaum selected 15 people working on the Transport for London network across the Victoria line – including train drivers, operational staff, and those working in facilities and administration – who over several hours, were individually painted in her studio to create a large-scale group portrait specifically for the entrance of Brixton Underground station.

Brixton Mural Map

Murals are indicators of both place and time. During the 1970s and 80s, London became an important centre for mural production. Murals from this period represent the political climate, social context and communities who collaboratively made them. These qualities define the murals that populate Brixton today. However, as London is further developed, many murals are being damaged or destroyed. The surviving murals reveal the rapid change London has undergone in the past few decades, but they have not received the same recognition, protection and conservation as other public artworks or heritage sites in the city.

This Mural Map shares the stories behind Brixton’s murals and makes these overlooked public artworks more visible.

Brixton Schools Mural Design Project

From 2018-20 Art on the Underground has commissioned contemporary artists to create new artworks in response to the Brixton murals. These works explore commemoration, collective memory and the wider history of mural making, and will be on display at the Brixton Underground station entrance.

As part of this programme Art on the Underground has worked with artist Meera Chauda and six local primary schools to create artworks inspired by the Brixton murals. Each school has designed their own artwork, using drawing and collage, in response to the themes in the original murals. The schools visited specific murals which influenced them to think about what they wanted to celebrate and commemorate about their local area. The designs on display show the pupils’ responses, they are created from tessellated shapes, reminiscent of the London Underground tiles, which reflect each school’s symbol and colours.