“Finger lickin good” and “What's the point of that!”, were a couple of the milder Twitter responses to a new sculpture installed yesterday, 23 August, in London’s Trafalgar Square. The two giant index fingers, by the Mexican artist José Rivelino, prove that when poked by public art, rather than thumb their noses at it, the British cannot resist a good pun—especially with social media at their fingertips.
Rivelino told the Evening Standard newspaper that the work, You (2015), is about “the highly significant issue of equality between human beings”.
The painted-bronze sculpture—measuring 14.5m and weighing 25 tons—is one of four large works dotted around the capital for Contemporary Mexican Sculpture: the Vision of Four Artists. Paloma Torres’s Building in the rain (2015) will be installed nearby on the Mall, while Jorge Yazpik’s Untitled (2014) and Yvonne Domenge’s Coral Coquino (2015) are already in place in Grosvenor Gardens and Canada Square, respectively.
The official opening celebrations are scheduled to take place on 3 September and the works will remain on show until December. The exhibition is part of the Dual Year of UK and Mexico 2015, a “year-long celebration of cultural, educational and business exchange”, and is sponsored by Lodgeo.