Shortlist Announced for Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth

News Tschabalala Self and Andra Ursuţa Win Fourth Plinth Commissions Sam Gaskin

The shortlisted artists are Chila Burman, Thomas J Price, Veronica Ryan, Tschabalala Self, Andra Ursuţa, Gabriel Chaile and Ruth Ewan. The two winning works will be announced next month.

Chila Burman’s sculpture The Smile You Send Returns to You (2024) centres on her father’s ice cream van and reflects on his journey to the U.K. from India.

Burman has been producing art for public spaces since the mid-1980s. The artist’s Remembering a Brave New World, with its references to colonial history, took over the portico of Tate Britain for the 2020 Tate Winter Commission.

Thomas J. Price’s monumental Ancient Feelings depicts a fictional woman whose features have been amalgamated from various sources. Price harnesses the gold-bronze visual language of public sculpture to question preconceived attitudes toward representation and identity. Speaking with Ocula Magazine in 2019, he noted that this is to ’[point] to the intrinsic worth everyone has as a human’.

Price’s public sculpture has existing significance in London. In 2022, his Warm Shores was unveiled by the London Borough of Hackney in honour of the Windrush Generation.

Veronica Ryan’s Sweet Potatoes and Yams are Not the Same features a sweet potato island erupting into vine leaves. Ryan often harnesses imagery of food across her sculpture, elevating everyday imagery to a high level of esteem.

Like Price, Ryan has an existing record of public sculpture in London. She became the first Black woman artist to have a permanent public sculpture in the U.K. with Custard Apple, Breadfruit and Soursop (all 2021). Ryan won the Turner Prize in 2022.

Gabriel Chaile’s Hornero celebrates the Rufous Hornero bird, a national emblem of Argentina. Often found building their mud nests on high monuments, the natural forms starkly contrast with the bronze and marble below. Chaile’s proposed sculpture mimics the bird’s mud structure, adapted for the Fourth Plinth.

Ruth Ewan’s Believe in Discontent references words by suffragist Charlotte Despard and alludes to the portrayal of women suffragists as ‘black cats’ in the media and the continued description of women as ‘catty’ in contemporary culture.

Andra Ursuța’s Untitled is a life-sized equestrian statue covered in a shroud and cast in resin. It inverts the importance of the typical equestrian portrait by erasing it in plain sight.

Coupled with its translucent slime-green appearance, there’s a feeling that this is a ghost of history—perhaps a cancelled public monument.

Tschabalala Self’s Lady in Blue endeavours to bring the contemporary ‘everywoman’ to Trafalgar Square, rejecting the traditional worship of an individual often seen in public sculpture.

Self utilises the history of portraiture and public sculpture in her materials, with the blue patina referencing lapis lazuli.

Maquettes of the proposed works are on display at the National Gallery, London, until 17 March 2024. —[O]

Main image: Chila Kumari Singh Burman, The Smile You Send Returns To You (2024). Photo: James O Jenkins.