New to the Wharf: Explore our newer artworks
Explore the artworks that haven’t quite made their way on to our map yet.
Some are recent acquisitions, and some were originally commissioned as temporary installations that we didn’t want to part with!
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.
