The artists Tschabalala Self and Andra Ursuța have won the next commissions for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, one of the UK’s most important platforms for contemporary art.
Self’s work will be unveiled in 2026; Ursuța’s sculpture will stand on the plinth two years later. The other artists in the running for the Fourth Plinth commissions were Chila Burman, Gabriel Chaile, Ruth Ewan, Veronica Ryan and Thomas J. Price.
The Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, chaired by Ekow Eshun, with panellists including the artist Jeremy Deller, selected the winning works. A public consultation also informed the group’s decision.
"Homage to a young, metropolitan woman of colour": Tschabalala Self, Lady in Blue, 2024. A maquette of the work that will be placed on the Fourth Plinth in 2026 Photograph: James O Jenkins
Self’s piece, Lady in Blue, “pays homage to a young, metropolitan woman of colour who could be just one of many Londoners today”, according to a previous project statement. The work will be patinated with Lapis Lazuli blue.
In a 2020 interview, Self discussed her distinctive works depicting Black and predominantly female figures, which both “embrace and confound collective fantasies and assumptions surrounding the Black female body”, according to our correspondent Louisa Buck.
The Romanian-born Ursuța proposed the most abstract form, a life-sized equestrian statue covered in a shroud and cast in slime-green resin. “The work points towards an uncertain future. It is made in a hyper-fragmented, paranoid time when public space, consensus and community continue to dissolve,” the project statement says. In 2022, Ursuța presented a homage to an installation by the late Russian artist Ilya Kabakov at Art Basel (Vandal Lust, 2011/22).
"Towards an uncertain future": Andra Ursuța, Untitled, 2024. Maquette of the work that will be placed on the Fourth Plinth in 2028 Photo: James O Jenkins
The Fourth Plinth programme was launched in 1998 by the RSA (the Royal Society for arts, manufactures and commerce) with the support of the Cass Sculpture Foundation. Fourteen artists, including Yinka Shonibare, Rachel Whiteread and Mark Wallinger have shown works on the plinth since the contemporary art initiative was launched in 1999.
The Fourth Plinth is funded by the Mayor of London with support from Arts Council England and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Last year a British government minister, Ben Wallace, proposed erecting a statue of the Second World War code-breaker Alan Turing on the Fourth Plinth. Other UK politicians have also suggested that a memorial to the late Queen Elizabeth II could stand on the plinth.