Built in 1841 as the base for a life-size statue of King William IV that never materialized (due to lack of funds), the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in the heart of London remained empty until 1998. After a short series of three-dimensional artworks were placed on the plinth by the Royal Society of Arts, the U.K. government agreed to a rolling set of temporary commissions, and the granite block has been a staging post for work by some of the world’s most invigorating contemporary artists ever since. The commissions stay in place for two years and are chosen from a shortlist of proposals via a public vote and a panel of artists, journalists and curators (the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group) headed by the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan. In March, the Mayor announced the upcoming sculpture commissions—for 2026 and 2028—will be by Tschabalala Self and Andra Ursuţa, who will follow in the footsteps of the likes of Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread and David Shrigley.
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The U.K. has had an interesting relationship with monuments and statuary over the past few years. In Bristol in 2020, a crowd of Black Lives Matter protestors pulled down a bronze statue of Edward Colston and dumped it in the nearby harbor. Colston was an eighteenth-century merchant who made his fortune in part from slavery, and the statue’s dumping followed years of unease at its presence. With the debate about the 21st-century........