Transport for London (TfL) reveals plans for four major artworks from contemporary artists to be introduced with its Art on the Underground programme this year, as the programme marks its 25th anniversary and continues to be at the forefront of ideas around art and public space.
Since Art on the Underground came into being in 2000 the programme has had a renowned history of commissioning site-specific artworks. These existing works, which include Alexandre da Cunha’s kinetic sculpture at Battersea Power Station Underground station and Mark Wallinger’s Labyrinth across London Underground network, speak to people, places, and histories, placing trust in artists and the creative process.
The new 2025 programme continues this tradition with a series of commissions, to be introduced over the course of the year, that encourage meaningful conversations between artists and the public and reflect on the history and movement of London today. In spring a large-scale collaborative artwork by Ahmet Öğüt will be unveiled at Stratford station and a new pocket Tube map will feature a design by Agnes Denes, based on her iconic work Map Projections.
Later in the year, a new audio commission by Rory Pilgrim will be heard by millions of commuters at Waterloo station and a new painting by Rudy Loewe will be the ninth mural instalment at Brixton station, continuing TfL’s series of commissions that respond to the rich history of murals in the area from the 1980s and the wider social and political history of mural making.
Justine Simons OBE, Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries, said: “Art on the Underground is renowned around the world for transforming London’s Tube into a large public art gallery. Offering free art to the millions traveling every day, it builds on our rich history of inspiring art and design across the transport network and has become an integral part of London’s story as a creative capital. As we celebrate its 25th anniversary this year, there is so much to look forward to, with four brilliant new artworks being added to the network, as we build a better London for everyone.”
Eleanor Pinfield, Head of Art on the Underground, said: “Art on the Underground has been bringing leading international artists to the spaces of the Tube for 25 years. In 2025, we continue this tradition, with a series of thoughtful commissions that foreground interactions with art in daily life. Across 2025, the programme will interrogate how art can save us and what it means to gather together, in shared space and with local communities. Seen and heard by millions, the 2025 programme is a response to London today, whilst always reflecting on our past and possible futures.”
Rudy Loewe, Spaces of Return, 2024. On view at The Auto BLDG, 9th Floor as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art, 2024. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photography Toni Hafkenscheid
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A large-scale artwork will launch in March at Stratford Underground station on 18 March with artist Ahmet Öğüt in collaboration with New Contemporaries In Art. Öğüt is a sociocultural initiator, artist and lecturer, working across a variety of media. His new commission, Saved by the Whale’s Tail, Saved by Art, will explore the role art plays in everyday life. Öğüt’s project was inspired by an incident that occurred in 2020 when a train on the Rotterdam Metro overran the stop blocks at a station located on an elevated Metro line. A carriage, at risk of falling into the water beneath, was ‘saved’ by a 10-metre-high public art sculpture of a whale’s tail, by architect Maarten Struijs, which prevented its fall. This visual metaphor for the power of art to save lives provided the impetus for a project that seeks to uncover many more stories. Encompassing a major installation alongside a call out to the public for stories that champion, interrogate and celebrate how art has saved lives, the commission culminates in a prize for the most moving submission, for which Öğüt has created a sculpture akin to an award ceremony trophy to be awarded later in 2025
A new pocket Tube Map launching in the spring will feature a new artwork by Hungarian-born American artist Agnes Denes. A conceptual artist who was a pioneer of environmental art in the 1960s and 1970s, Denes has worked across a wide range of media – from monumental land art, to sculpture, poetry and intricate drawings, which she calls a form of “visual philosophy”. Denes has created an artwork for the 41st pocket Tube map cover that synthesises her interconnected interests in ecology, engineering, and public space. For her commission she has created an “electrified” rendering from her most iconic work, Map Projections, in which she reimagines the depictions of the earth in a series of different shapes
A new audio work at Waterloo Tube station will be heard from 30 June – 13 July, produced by artist and composer Rory Pilgrim with the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk (CCSaR) programme. This programme realises an annual sound commission developed through an engagement with the CCSaR programme and the communities around Underground stations to spotlight the work of organisations who face structural barriers to sustaining space in the capital and to create and share resonances from across the city. The artwork will be heard through station speakers along the moving walkway connecting the Northern and Jubilee lines at Waterloo station for a two-week period in early July 2025. It will be heard by thousands of customers who pass through Waterloo station each day. A Turner Prize nominee in 2023, Pilgrim works collaboratively and in dialogue with others, across music composition, performance, film, drawing and text, reflecting and redefining how we come together to shape social change
A new mural will launch at Brixton Tube station in November by Rudy Loewe. Loewe’s artistic practice responds to ways in which the state shapes our remembering of history and the intentional silences in institutional archives. Loewe forms narratives and makes space for different kinds of knowledge by inviting those voices suppressed by the dominant retelling of history. Their graphic approach to painting – featuring bold, flat colours – references their background in comics and illustration and often combines text, image and sequential narrative. Loewe’s new work will be part of the Brixton Mural Programme and highlight the ways in which people gather and have gathered in Brixton and speaks to the sensorial experience that is Brixton today. Loewe is the ninth artist in the series of commissions at Brixton Tube station which, since 2018, has responded to the diverse narratives of the local murals painted in the 1980s, the rapid development of the area and the wider social and political history of mural making
The 2025 programme follows a series of works introduced by Art on the Underground in 2024, including the permanent mosaic Angels of History by Quinlan and Hastings at St James’s Park, London’s only Grade-1 listed station, Three Women, a mural at Brixton Tube station by Turner Prize nominee Claudette Johnson, and A Taste of Home, a series of artworks in the rotunda at Heathrow Terminal 4 Underground station in June by British artist and photographer Joy Gregory.
