New to the Wharf: Explore our newer artworks

Electro-Rainbow is an installation by artist Lothar Götz initially commissioned for Pride month 2022 to celebrate LGBTQ+ culture.

The artwork is a site-specific piece which responds to the giant glass panels that make up the walls surface. The installation takes inspiration from the Progress Pride Rainbow Flag, incorporating them and adapting the stripes into a shifting rainbow of coloured triangles within the square panels. The artist also sees the work akin to the floor of a disco or club, with the patterns and colours dancing across the surface like rays of light on a dancefloor. This provides an echo of the importance of club culture in the development of LGBTQ+ identities.

Elantica ‘The Boulder’ uses discarded circuit-boards to fuse nature and artifice. By mimicking a natural rock formation with electronic materials, the boulder seeks to demonstrate our world’s tendency to create a digital version of reality. The repurposing of e-waste as the art medium for this geometric form indicates a desired pursuit of harmony between nature and technology. This piece was first showcased in our Winter Lights festival in January 2023 and now forms part of our Public Art collection. Whilst this piece can be enjoyed any time of day, it is best viewed after dusk when it is illuminated.

Katrina’s practice is deeply informed by the joyful clash of diversity, shapes, people and places in her surroundings. Coming Together is a colourful and functional art installation of sculptural benches; inspired by 2D abstract prints based on the architecture of Canary Wharf.

The benches help in a changing society to nurture relationships and reconnect with one another. They can be moved about and slotted together in new formations, acting as one large installation or a number of smaller ones. Coming Together aims to encourage play and wellbeing, helping to lift the mood for those who engage with the installation.

Placed in the idyllic Harbour Quay Gardens, Rasmussen has created an alluring red surface that twists and flows, shifting between curves and sharp edges, through the convex and concave. The elegant sculpture creates wonderful shapes through the form itself as well as its negative space.

Head down to Montgomery Street overlooking South Dock and check out the most recent addition to the Canary Wharf permanent art collection: a vibrant and dynamic, 15-metre, hand painted mural by artist Lydia Hamblet.

The new piece, which overlooks Canary Wharf’s impressive architecture and docks, is a testament to the power of art in transforming urban spaces and bringing communities together. As a Royal College of Art graduate and recipient of the Clifford Chance Purchase Prize, the mural is true to Hamblet’s expressive, abstracted style. The large-scale work generates an immense sense of movement playing out, in the artist’s own words, “like a film reel” as the public walk along it.

Borrowing the very popular, and very British theme of weather, the mural aims to promote a universality, a shared encounter that may in turn prompt a personal memory or feeling.

The title of the piece Click Your Heels Together Three Times ‘is a reference to Judy Garland’s ruby shoes in The Wizard of Oz, Judy being a huge gay icon, and the movie being an important work in the queer filmic canon, with this installation being the architectural scale equivalent of her shoes in the film.’ says Adam. Dorothy, and the friends she makes along the way, seek to find their inner desires within the escapist world of Oz before the infamous ruby slippers ground this journey of self-discovery in reality by returning her home. Adam’s work acts similarly by embedding queer coded artworks and structures within the public realm, transporting them from their imagination and into our reality.

With its opening scenes set in the black and white world of small-town Kansas, The Wizard of Oz bursts into a technicolour dream world once Dorothy enters the world of Oz. Parallels can be seen here with the layering of Adam’s rainbow gradient over the existing grey toned structure, taking a moment of structural bravura and modernist strength, and transforming it with a celebratory sheath of colourful, dramatic drag. A queer outfit that kaleidoscopically reinvents a piece of infrastructure used by tens of thousands a day, which also adds a bright and proud note of colour to the square in which it sits.

GET REAL by Henry Gibbs, comprises a mural trisected to depict moments of queer friendships, intimacies and conceptions of the self. Lending its name from Simon Shore’s film Get Real (1998) and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of The Real, the work alludes to queer narratives, often self-navigated, with less of an emphasis on ‘coming out’ or more stereotypical facets associated with queer identity, but to an insistence of accessing Real drives, Real connections, Real self and Real love. Through degrees of self-reflection, relative distance, forms of gesture and queer relationality, the Real (the source of our drives) can inform queer expression as emotional output and not just sexual being.

Within the mural, light reflects from a base layer of solar reflective paint, a material originally compounded for building heat regulation and protection against UV roof damage, the mural replicates a digital glow, augmented by natural or artificial light whether in daytime or at night. Overlaying this, the black halftone design optically absorbs all colour which, reminiscent to the colour in digital pixels, consists of repetitively painted dots intended to emphasise the recurrence of self-imaging and queer gesture online and through social media. The formation of dots is modulated to form an image determined by distance. The translation of IRL to digital experience is configured as the images become clearer the further away you look or when captured on your phone – a reparative gesture of taking a step back to exercise how we see.

Commissioned in partnership with Pictorum Gallery.