Tuesday 7 Jan 2025
TfL announces rich programme of new artworks as it celebrates 25 years of Art on the Underground
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- TfL’s Art on the Underground programme reveals four major new artworks coming to the network in 2025
- Works include a piece by Ahmet Öğüt that calls on the public to share moments when art has saved them, a sound installation at Waterloo station by Rory Pilgrim and a new pocket Tube map by Agnes Denes
- Art on the Underground celebrates 25 years of bringing art into the public realm
Transport for London (TfL) reveals plans for four major artworks from contemporary artists to be introduced with its Art on the Underground programme this year, as the programme marks its 25th anniversary and continues to be at the forefront of ideas around art and public space.
Since Art on the Underground came into being in 2000 the programme has had a renowned history of commissioning site-specific artworks. These existing works, which include Alexandre da Cunha’s kinetic sculpture at Battersea Power Station Underground station and Mark Wallinger’s Labyrinth across London Underground network, speak to people, places, and histories, placing trust in artists and the creative process.
The new 2025 programme continues this tradition with a series of commissions, to be introduced over the course of the year, that encourage meaningful conversations between artists and the public and reflect on the history and movement of London today. In spring a large-scale collaborative artwork by Ahmet Öğüt will be unveiled at Stratford station and a new pocket Tube map will feature a design by Agnes Denes, based on her iconic work Map Projections.
Later in the year, a new audio commission by Rory Pilgrim will be heard by millions of commuters at Waterloo station and a new painting by Rudy Loewe will be the ninth mural instalment at Brixton station, continuing TfL’s series of commissions that respond to the rich history of murals in the area from the 1980s and the wider social and political history of mural making.
Justine Simons OBE, Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries, said: “Art on the Underground is renowned around the world for transforming London’s Tube into a large public art gallery. Offering free art to the millions traveling every day, it builds on our rich history of inspiring art and design across the transport network and has become an integral part of London’s story as a creative capital. As we celebrate its 25th anniversary this year, there is so much to look forward to, with four brilliant new artworks being added to the network, as we build a better London for everyone."
Eleanor Pinfield, Head of Art on the Underground, said: “Art on the Underground has been bringing leading international artists to the spaces of the Tube for 25 years. In 2025, we continue this tradition, with a series of thoughtful commissions that foreground interactions with art in daily life. Across 2025, the programme will interrogate how art can save us and what it means to gather together, in shared space and with local communities. Seen and heard by millions, the 2025 programme is a response to London today, whilst always reflecting on our past and possible futures.”
- A large-scale artwork will launch in March at Stratford Underground station on 18 March with artist Ahmet Öğüt in collaboration with New Contemporaries In Art. Öğüt is a sociocultural initiator, artist and lecturer, working across a variety of media. His new commission, Saved by the Whale’s Tail, Saved by Art, will explore the role art plays in everyday life. Öğüt’s project was inspired by an incident that occurred in 2020 when a train on the Rotterdam Metro overran the stop blocks at a station located on an elevated Metro line. A carriage, at risk of falling into the water beneath, was ‘saved’ by a 10-metre-high public art sculpture of a whale’s tail, by architect Maarten Struijs, which prevented its fall. This visual metaphor for the power of art to save lives provided the impetus for a project that seeks to uncover many more stories. Encompassing a major installation alongside a call out to the public for stories that champion, interrogate and celebrate how art has saved lives, the commission culminates in a prize for the most moving submission, for which Öğüt has created a sculpture akin to an award ceremony trophy to be awarded later in 2025
- A new pocket Tube Map launching in the spring will feature a new artwork by Hungarian-born American artist Agnes Denes. A conceptual artist who was a pioneer of environmental art in the 1960s and 1970s, Denes has worked across a wide range of media – from monumental land art, to sculpture, poetry and intricate drawings, which she calls a form of “visual philosophy”. Denes has created an artwork for the 41st pocket Tube map cover that synthesises her interconnected interests in ecology, engineering, and public space. For her commission she has created an “electrified” rendering from her most iconic work, Map Projections, in which she reimagines the depictions of the earth in a series of different shapes
- A new audio work at Waterloo Tube station will be heard from 30 June – 13 July, produced by artist and composer Rory Pilgrim with the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk (CCSaR) programme. This programme realises an annual sound commission developed through an engagement with the CCSaR programme and the communities around Underground stations to spotlight the work of organisations who face structural barriers to sustaining space in the capital and to create and share resonances from across the city. The artwork will be heard through station speakers along the moving walkway connecting the Northern and Jubilee lines at Waterloo station for a two-week period in early July 2025. It will be heard by thousands of customers who pass through Waterloo station each day. A Turner Prize nominee in 2023, Pilgrim works collaboratively and in dialogue with others, across music composition, performance, film, drawing and text, reflecting and redefining how we come together to shape social change
- A new mural will launch at Brixton Tube station in November by Rudy Loewe. Loewe’s artistic practice responds to ways in which the state shapes our remembering of history and the intentional silences in institutional archives. Loewe forms narratives and makes space for different kinds of knowledge by inviting those voices suppressed by the dominant retelling of history. Their graphic approach to painting – featuring bold, flat colours – references their background in comics and illustration and often combines text, image and sequential narrative. Loewe’s new work will be part of the Brixton Mural Programme and highlight the ways in which people gather and have gathered in Brixton and speaks to the sensorial experience that is Brixton today. Loewe is the ninth artist in the series of commissions at Brixton Tube station which, since 2018, has responded to the diverse narratives of the local murals painted in the 1980s, the rapid development of the area and the wider social and political history of mural making
The 2025 programme follows a series of works introduced by Art on the Underground in 2024, including the permanent mosaic Angels of History by Quinlan and Hastings at St James’s Park, London’s only Grade-1 listed station, Three Women, a mural at Brixton Tube station by Turner Prize nominee Claudette Johnson, and A Taste of Home, a series of artworks in the rotunda at Heathrow Terminal 4 Underground station in June by British artist and photographer Joy Gregory.
Contact Information
TfL Press Office
Transport for London
0343 222 4141
pressoffice@tfl.gov.uk
Notes to editors
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.
Biographies
Agnes Denes (b. Budapest, Hungary 1931) is one of the most prominent artists of our time, the leading pioneer of the present environmental art movement whose work deals with cultural and social issues that address the challenges of global survival. She is also internationally known for works created in a wide range of mediums, investigating science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, poetry, history, and music.
She has participated in more than 700 solo and group exhibitions and her works are in the collections of important institutions throughout the world. A highly critically acclaimed survey of Denes’s work, that included three newly commissioned sculptures, ran from October 2019 to March 2020 in at The Shed, New York’s newest major cultural institution.
Works by the artist were recently seen in The Milk of Dreams, the main exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia 2022, curated by Cecilia Alemani; Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Adaptation: A Re-centered Earth, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, The Phillipines; The Material Revolution, E-Werk Luckenwald, Germany, and Dear Earth: Art in a Time of Crisis, The Hayward Gallery, London.
Works by Agnes Denes are in the collections of important museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art ,and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and The Phillips Collection in Washington DC; the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and those of many other major institutions worldwide.
Rudy Loewe (b.1987) is a visual artist living in London, UK. Loewe’s work examines socio-political dynamics and narrates histories collected through archival research, weaving in African and Caribbean folklore. Through media such as painting, drawing, and sculpture, Loewe unravels British government operations attempting to dismantle Caribbean black resistance movements during the 1960s and ‘70s as part of their ongoing PhD research.
Anansi, the trickster, is a recurrent character in Loewe’s work, whom they envisage as a gender-nonconforming shapeshifter. Loewe questions who amongst us is forced to shapeshift to survive.
Loewe has exhibited internationally in institutions and galleries, including the 2023 Liverpool Biennial, UK; South London Gallery, UK; Royal Academy, UK; Regart Centre D'Artistes En Art Actuel, CA; Serpentine Galleries, UK; Marabouparken, SE; Independent Art Fair, USA; and the 2024 Toronto Biennial, CA.
Residencies include Toronto Biennial, Canada (2024); Cooper Cole Gallery, Canada (2024); Labverde, Brazil (2023); Wysing Arts Centre, UK (2023); Serpentine Galleries, UK (2020); Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada (2019).
Ahmet Öğüt was born in Silvan, Diyarbakir, Ahmet Öğüt completed his BA from the Fine Arts Faculty at Hacettepe University, Ankara, MA from Art and Design Faculty at Yıldız Teknik University, Istanbul. He works across different media and has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions in institutions such as Van Abbemuseum, State of Concept Athens, Kunstverein Dresden, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Chisenhale Gallery; Berkeley Art Museum; and Kunsthalle Basel. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including; Poetics of Power, Kunsthaus Graz, (2024); Allegory of public happiness, Galleria Civica di Trento (2024); Dhaka Art Summit (2023); 17th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, (2022); FRONT International 2022, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Ohio (2022); Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone (2021); In the Presence of Absence, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020); Zero Gravity at Nam SeMA, Seoul Museum of Art (2019); Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale (2018); the British Art Show 8 (2015-2017); the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); Performa 13, the Fifth Biennial of Visual Art Performance, New York (2013); the 7th Liverpool Biennial (2012); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); the New Museum Triennial, New York (2009); and the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2008). Öğüt was awarded the Visible Award for the Silent University (2013); the special prize of the Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Ukraine (2012); the De Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs 2011, Netherlands; and the Kunstpreis Europas Zukunft, Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany (2010). He co-represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). Lives and works in Amsterdam and Istanbul. His works in institutional collections such as The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Kadist, San Francisco, US - Paris; Rennie Collection, Vancouver; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Frans Hals Museum; FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkerque; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis; KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Hesinki; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing; Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul. Some of his upcoming shows are the Singapore Biennale 2025 and group show “Translated into Socialism” at Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) Ljubljana. Based in Amsterdam and Istanbul.
Rory Pilgrim (Bristol, 1988) works in a wide range of media including songwriting, composing music, film, music video, text, drawing and live performances. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Pilgrim works with others through a different methods of dialogue, collaboration and workshops. In an age of increasing technological interaction, Rory's work creates connections between activism, spirituality, music and how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens.
Recent Solo Shows include: Chisenhale Gallery (2024), Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd - Centraal Museum Utrecht (2024), WAMX, Turku (2022), Kunstverein Braunschweig (duo-2021), Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2020), Between Bridges, Berlin (2019) Ming Studios, Boise (2019), Andriesse-Eyck Gallery, Amsterdam NL (2018) and South London Gallery (2018). Rory has also made commissions, screenings and performances for Serpentine Galleries, London (2022), MoMA, New York (2022), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), Glasgow Film Festival (2020), Images Festival, Toronto (2019) and Transmediale Festival, HKW, Berlin (2019). In 2019, Pilgrim won the Prix de Rome. In 2023, Pilgrim was nominated for the Turner Prize.
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