Thursday 8 Jan 2026
TfL announces 2026 Art on the Underground programme and tenth annual Brixton mural commission
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- Art on the Underground has announced five new commissions for 2026 that will bring art to the millions of people who will travel on London’s transport network this year
- The renowned British painter Hurvin Anderson has been commissioned for the tenth annual commission in the Brixton Mural Programme, which will launch in November and succeed the current mural by Rudy Loewe
- Artists Ain Bailey, Caroline Walker, Ellen Gallagher and Phoebe Boswell will also feature works on the London transport network, with Walker to create a large-scale painting featuring women working on the network at night
- Reed is the sponsor for the 2026 commissions, as part of its ongoing commitment to Art on the Underground
Transport for London (TfL) has announced five new works in its rich and varied Art on the Underground programme for 2026. The new commissions will give space to underrepresented voices, and the renowned painter Hurvin Anderson will deliver the tenth annual commission in the Brixton Mural Programme in November.
Since its conception in 2000, Art on the Underground has commissioned site-specific works on the TfL network that examine themes of community, space and place, and bring unexpected interactions and new perspectives to the millions who travel on London’s transport network each year. Five new commissions by contemporary artists will launch over the course of the year, inspired by subterranean histories, lost voices and hidden work, exploring historic imbalances and under-representation and reframing public space.
London-based artist, Phoebe Boswell will launch a large-scale photographic artwork at Bethnal Green and Notting Hill Underground stations in March, inspired by local Black swimming communities, while American artist Ellen Gallagher will explore colonial landscapes and marine mythology in her design for the 42nd pocket Tube map.
The third audio artwork commission at Waterloo Underground station will run for 10 days in the summer with the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme, by London-based composer, artist and DJ Ain Bailey. In September, a largescale artwork by Scottish painter Caroline Walker, spotlighting women who work on the TfL network at night, will be introduced at Stratford station.
In November, a new mural will launch at Brixton Underground station by leading painter Hurvin Anderson. It will be the tenth in a series of annual commissions that responds to the rich history of murals in Brixton from the 1980s, and the wider social and political history of mural making. It will follow Anderson’s upcoming major exhibition at Tate Britain.
2026’s programme is sponsored by specialist recruitment company, Reed, as part of its ongoing commitment to Art on the Underground.
Justine Simons OBE, Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries, said: “For two and a half decades, Art on the Underground has shown how public art can bring joy, spark conversation and connect our communities. This year we have five new commissions to look forward to, which are sure to enrich our journeys and amplify untold stories that celebrate the diversity and resilience of our capital. From Hurvin Anderson bringing his renowned style to Brixton to Phoebe Boswell being inspired by local Black swimming communities, these works will entertain and delight, as we build a better London for everyone.”
Eleanor Pinfield, Head of Art on the Underground, said: “Art on the Underground continues to bring remarkable artists to London, reframing public space and our interactions within it. This year, we present a programme of artworks that explore omissions from public space; works engaging with lost waterways of London, the lost venues that have supported voices in the city and the hidden labour of nighttime workers. We also mark our tenth artwork in the remarkable series at Brixton station, works that go some way to capture the multifaceted nature of Brixton over time. These works, and our wider programme, continue to shape, direct and honour how we collectively experience and remember place – whether that be our local community or spaces we travel through at different times of our lives.”
James Reed, CBE, Chairman and CEO of Reed Employment, said: “I am delighted to continue our sponsorship of Art on the Underground, a programme that gets into the heart of London, influencing how we feel and experience the city each day. As a Londoner, it is very exciting to see or hear new artwork and this programme is rich in new experiences for travellers. I can’t wait to see each project unfold.”
The Art on the Underground programme for 2026 includes:
- A large-scale photographic artwork by London-based artist Phoebe Boswell will launch at Bethnal Green and Notting Hill stations in March. Following a public call out to Black swimming communities around Bethnal Green and Notting Hill, this new work will continue Boswell’s exploration of water as a site of healing, migratory trauma and collective power. Installed on panels running adjacent to the escalators, the artwork will comprise four multi-layered photographic assemblages of Black swimmers who have made London their home, or whose families have historically migrated here across generations. Beneath the city’s surface, the Tube shares its underground world with a labyrinth of lost rivers. This project imagines those waterways as channels for memory and resistance, exploring notions of aquatic journeys and migratory routes to London, particularly for Black diasporic communities. Guided by the hydro-feminist notion that all bodies of water are connected, this new work is conceived as ‘a call to the surface,’ an invitation to collective consciousness about the world we inhabit together
- For the 42nd edition of the pocket Tube map, American artist Ellen Gallagher will invite viewers on a journey. Gallagher describes her artistic process as driven by a ‘jitter’ which aims to shake loose aesthetic possibilities from seemingly impermeable cultural structures. Expanding on her interest in colonial topographies and marine mythology, Gallagher’s Tube map cover will explore notions of sediment and the subterranean waterways which run alongside the Underground tunnels. Launching in June, the 42nd pocket Tube map will remain in circulation for a year
- A new audio work by London-based composer, artist and DJ Ain Bailey, her first UK public artwork, will launch in in late June. It is the third audio artwork commission in a series for Waterloo Underground station with the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme. Bailey's audio work for Waterloo undertakes an autobiographical mapping of London. Featuring an original composition and recording by London-born British-Caribbean experimental vocalist and movement artist Elaine Mitchener, the commission will pay homage to a list of more than 60 London premises that have now closed. Highlighting the far-reaching development of the city, which has driven closures particularly over the past 15 years, Bailey's commission will respond to ideas of cultural lifecycles. It will ask how an artwork, or the activity of cultural spaces, both those lost and which remain active, produce experiences of collectively that don't occur spontaneously, for example when moving through public space
- A large-scale commission by Scottish painter Caroline Walker will launch at Stratford station in September. Walker is renowned for her figurative paintings depicting the lived experience of women. Working across a range of scales, her larger-scale works capture women in moments of action or contemplation, the visual complexity of their surroundings mirroring that of their imagined inner lives to create cinematic tableaus. For her Art on the Underground commission, Walker will explore the often-invisible labour of women working on TfL’s networks at night. Following visits to Stratford Market Depot, where all Jubilee line trains return each evening to be cleaned and maintained, Walker has shadowed women working night shifts as Train Operators and cleaners. This new work for Stratford station will illuminate the Underground’s 24-hour workforce and the women whose unseen labour keeps the network running
- For the tenth Brixton Mural, a new commission by internationally renowned British painter Hurvin Anderson. His site-specific work for Brixton Underground station will extend a decades-long investigation into scenes of transit and migration. It opens in the same year as his major survey exhibition at Tate Britain. Anderson's paintings frequently reflect on diasporic life in the UK, and the postcolonial Caribbean landscape, drawing upon his upbringing in Birmingham by Jamaican parents, and time spent in Trinidad. A monumental 16-panel painting 'Passenger Opportunity,' inspired by Carl Abrahams' murals for Kingston Jamaica’s Norman Manley International Airport, is notable amongst the artist's explorations of diasporic experience, reflecting on cultural exchange and displacement. Anderson's commission for Brixton draws upon a close connection to the area, in which the artist has lived for extended periods, holding a studio in Tulse Hill since 1998. It is the tenth artwork in a commission series responding to the diverse narratives of local murals painted in the 1980s, and rapid development of the area, which has been a hub for Black communities over the past 75 years
Last year Art on the Underground celebrated its 25th anniversary along with Transport for London. The programme’s groundbreaking permanent pieces include Alexandre da Cunha's kinetic sculpture at Battersea Power Station Underground station, Mark Wallinger's ‘Labyrinth’ across London Underground network, and the mosaic ‘Angels of History’ by Hastings and Quinlan at St James’s Park station.
In 2025, Art on the Underground worked with Rudy Loewe on a mural at Brixton London Underground station, the ninth in the series Brixton Mural Programme commissions and succeeding works by artists including Claudette Johnson, Joy Labinjo and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. In September, multidisciplinary artist Ahmet Öğüt launched a large-scale artwork at Stratford, Rory Pilgrim was the second artist commissioned to create a sound artwork for Waterloo Underground station with the Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme in the summer, and American artist Agnes Denes designed the 41st pocket Tube map that launched in the spring.
Contact Information
TfL Press Office
Transport for London
0343 222 4141
pressoffice@tfl.gov.uk
Notes to editors
Images shown are previous works by each of the featuring artists
About Art on the Underground
Art on the Underground invites artists to create projects for London’s Underground that are seen by millions of people each day, changing the way people experience their city. Incorporating a range of artistic media - from painting, installation, sculpture, digital and performance, to prints and custom Tube map covers - the programme produces critically acclaimed projects that are accessible to all, and which draw together London’s diverse communities. Since its inception, Art on the Underground has presented commissions by UK-based and international artists including Jeremy Deller, Yayoi Kusama, Mark Wallinger, and Tania Bruguera, allowing the programme to remain at the forefront of contemporary debate on how art can shape public space.
Art on the Underground’s programme is sponsored by Reed.
Art on the Underground’s Brixton Programme
Art on the Underground initiated a series of commissions at Brixton in 2018 taking inspiration from the murals created in the local area during the 1980s. The programme has invited artists to respond to the diverse narratives of the murals, the rapid development of the area and the wider social and political history of mural making. 2026 will see the tenth commission in this series, from Hurvin Anderson.
Artists who have previously been commissioned in this series are:
- Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Remain, Thriving (2018)
- Aliza Nisenbaum, London Underground: Brixton Station and Victoria Line Staff (2018)
- Denzil Forrester, Brixton Blue (2019)
- Helen Johnson Things Held Fast (2021)
- Joy Labinjo, 5 more minutes (2021)
- Shanti Panchal, Endurance (2022)
- Jem Perucchini, Rebirth of a Nation (2023)
- Claudette Johnson, Three Women (2024)
- Rudy Loewe, The Congregation (2025)
Biographies
Hurvin Anderson
Hurvin Anderson was born in Birmingham in 1965 and lives and works in London. Forthcoming exhibitions include: Hurvin Anderson, Tate Britain, London, England (2026). Selected solo exhibitions include: Hurvin Anderson: Passenger Opportunity, Pérez Art Museum, Miami FL (2024-2025); Salon Paintings, Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, England (2023); Reverb, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, UK (2021); Hurvin Anderson, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago IL (2020), They Have a Mind of Their Own, Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2019); Hurvin Anderson: Dub Versions, New Art Exchange, Nottingham, England (2016); Hurvin Anderson: Backdrop, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis MI (2015); Hurvin Anderson: New Works, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England (2013); Hurvin Anderson: reporting back, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (2013); Peter’s Series 2007-09, Studio Museum, Harlem, New York NY (2009); Art Now: Hurvin Anderson, Tate Modern, London, England (2009). Recent group shows include: Life Between Islands, Caribbean – British Art, 50s to Now, Tate Britain, London, England (2021); Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, London, England (2021); British Art Show 9, Hayward Gallery, London, England [travelling to Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen, Scotland; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton, England; University of Wolverhampton School of Art, Wolverhampton, England; Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, England; The Whitworth, Manchester, England; KARST, Plymouth, England; The Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth, England; The Box, Plymouth, England; Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth, England]. In 2017, Hurvin Anderson was nominated for the Turner Prize.
Ain Bailey
Ain Bailey is a composer, artist and DJ. She facilitates workshops exploring identity, memory and sound. Past exhibitions include ‘The Range’ at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; ‘RE:Respite’ at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, a solo show at Cubitt Gallery, London: ‘And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love’ (2019). In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski created a composition and print entitled ‘Remember To Exhale’ for Studio Voltaire, London. Bailey was commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, to create the exhibition ‘Version’, and composed ‘Atlantic Railton’ for the ‘Listening To The City’ programme in the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. For 2022, Bailey created the moving image/sound work ‘Untitled: (Our Wedding)’ for the ‘Black Melancholia’ exhibition at CCS Bard, New York, USA and ‘Trioesque’ for Bruckenmusik 27 in Cologne, Germany. Bailey’s most recent commission was for FACT Liverpool’s ‘Resolution’ research project, for which she created the installation ‘Four’ (2024). She was the 2022-23 Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Bailey is a 2023 recipient of Awards For Artists from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and was shortlisted, together with Camden Art Centre, for the Freelands Foundation Award. Forthcoming in April 2026 is a solo exhibition with Camden Art Centre.
Phoebe Boswell
Phoebe Boswell is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who is interested in the liminal space between our collective histories and imagined futures; how we see ourselves and each other, and, consequently, how we free ourselves, or imagine freedom. Her figurative and interdisciplinary practice adopts an errant, diasporic framework, moving intuitively across media from drawing and painting to film, video, sound, and writing, to create immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, gestalt, the layering of sound, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Often inviting the participation of volunteers to create a nuanced collective voice in the making process, Boswell’s work investigates themes including protest, reclamation, grief, intimacy, migration, the body and its world-making. Her recent work considers the dichotomy of bodies of water as both repositories of painful historical experience and sites of renewal and hope.
Ellen Gallagher
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Ellen Gallagher lives and works between Rotterdam, Netherlands and New York. Gallagher builds multi-layered paintings that pivot between the natural world, mythology and history. Her painting process involves undoing and reforming trains of thought often over long periods of time and across linked bodies of works. Over a highly multifaceted career, Gallagher’s work has been united by what she calls a ‘jitter,’ an intellectual approach in which aesthetic possibilities are shook loose from seismic cracks beneath the surface of cultural entities normally thought to be unshakable and impermeable. Encompassing painting, drawing, collage and celluloid-based projections that fuse technique and material into syncretic form, her arresting compositions are a process of recovery and reconstitution through the accumulation and erasure of media, which results in palimpsestic and topographic surfaces.
The subtle textures of her paintings bear witness to a singular process that is materially and conceptually intertwined. Gallagher creates a geographic timeline in which interlocking forms appear to mutate between figuration and abstraction, like agents in a musical composition coming together in an evolving continuum. Gallagher’s work is included in many major international museum collections including MoMA, New York; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; MCA Chicago; MOCA, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Tate, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Caroline Walker
Caroline Walker was born in Dunfermline, Scotland (1982) where she now lives and works. Walker received a BA in Painting from Glasgow School of Art in 2004 and an MA in Painting from The Royal College of Art in 2009.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Mothering, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield & Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (UK), The Holiday Park, GRIMM, New York (USA); Nurture, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (UK); Women Observed, K11, Shanghai (CN); Lisa, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (UK); A Female Gaze, Nottingham Castle, Nottingham (UK); Birth Reflections, The Fitzrovia Chapel, London (UK); Windows, KM21, The Hague (NL); Women's Work, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham (UK).
Selected group exhibitions include: Good Mom/Bad Mom – Unraveling the Mother Myth, Centraal Museum, Utrecht (NL); Mama: From Mary to Merkel, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (DE); A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (USA); Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Hayward Gallery Touring, Bristol; Birmingham; Sheffield; Dundee; Carlow (UK & IE); Licked by the Waves | New Bathers in Art, Museum MORE, Gorssel (NL); My World, Singer Laren Museum, Laren (NL); The Painted Room, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); PUBLIC PRIVATE, Pond Society, Shanghai (CN); Traces of Displacement, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (UK).
Walker is represented in a number of major public collections including: Aïshti Foundation (LB); Art Gallery of New South Wales (AU); Arts Council Collection (UK); The British Museum (UK); Dallas Museum of Art (USA); Harris Museum (UK), He Art Museum (CN); The Hepworth Wakefield (UK); High Museum of Art (USA); Huamao Beijing Foundation (CN); The Hunterian (UK); Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (USA); Kistefos Museum (NO); Kunstmuseum Den Haag (NL); Longlati Foundation (CN); Museum of Fine Arts Houston (USA); Museum Voorlinden (NL); National Galleries of Scotland (UK); National Museum of Wales (UK); The National Museum of Women in the Arts (USA); Pallant House Gallery (UK); Pérez Art Museum (USA); The Rachofsky Collection (USA); Sifang Art Museum (CN); Tate (UK); Government Art Collection (UK); The University of Cambridge (UK); University of Warwick (UK) and Yale University Art Gallery (USA).
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