Sculpture in the City

If you are in the mood for a stroll on one of these crisp winter mornings, we can highly recommend checking out Sculpture in the City, a free outdoor sculpture exhibition in the City of London curated by Arts Consultant and Cultural Producer, Stella Ioannou. It features site-specific installations from nine artists, including The Chapman Brothers, Anthony Gormley and Richard Wentworth. Artists’ work has been produced ‘in response to the surrounding architecture and built environment’ which made us smile when we saw Jake and Dinos Chapman’s fairytale dinosaurs titled ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’. We won’t speculate as to what they may have been referring! Sculptures range from the humorous (as already mentioned) to the poignant: Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, which sits on the site of an IRA bomb 20 years ago in Bishopsgate.

Our Managing Director, Richard attended one of the Sculpture in the City debates, and these are his gorgeous pictures of the London skyline. There was some interesting discussion around the place for public art, something that Ryan Gander tackled head-on in his installation ‘More Shiny Things That Don’t Really Mean Anything’. Public sculpture through history has so often been about asserting the importance of an individual, or institution, that perhaps it hasn’t really meant anything to the public that it is apparently for. Keith Coventry's pieces ‘Bench’ and ‘Mare Street’ could be said to represent the urban environment as the majority of city dwellers more commonly experience it.

Public sculpture will always be a contentious issue, as is any intervention that changes the space around us. There will always be arguments, debate and the accusation of wasted money but that means that people are looking and thinking about the city they occupy and that has to be a good thing.

Sculpture in the City runs until May 2014 in various locations around the Square Mile.