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Mark Wallinger
Born
Ecce Homo, 1999
The first occupant set the terms for everything after it: a life-sized figure of Christ, naked apart from a loincloth, hands bound behind his back, on a plinth built for a king on horseback. Against that scale he looked minuscule, and that was the point. Every hero in the square is larger than life; Wallinger offered an ordinary-sized man facing judgment and let the expanse of empty stone around him do the arguing. It remains the cleanest idea the plinth has had.
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Bill Woodrow
Born
Regardless of History, 2000
A human head crushed between a book and the roots of a tree, cast in bronze so it sat in the same dark register as the square's official statues. Where Wallinger worked through scale, Woodrow worked through allegory: knowledge and nature grinding down the individual, under a column raised to one man's fame. It is the least remembered of the early three, partly because it was the most conventional in form, but it read clearly from the ground and asked the right question of a square full of monuments.
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Rachel Whiteread
Born
Monument, 2001
Whiteread answered the empty plinth with the plinth itself: a cast of it in transparent resin, set upside down on top of the original. A sculptor known for casting the empty spaces in and around everyday objects and buildings turned the problem of what to put up there into the artwork. Being clear, it changed with the London light and weather rather than standing against it. As a closing statement for the RSA's experiment it was hard to beat, because it made everyone look at the empty plinth one last time.
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Marc Quinn
Born
Alison Lapper Pregnant, 2005 to 2007
The first Mayor of London commission, unveiled on September 15, 2005, was a 3.6-meter figure in white Carrara marble, weighing 13 metric tons, of the artist Alison Lapper, heavily pregnant. Lapper was born with phocomelia, with no arms and shortened legs. Quinn used the most classical material in the sculptor's kit for a body the classical tradition never put on a pedestal, in the same square as Nelson, who lost his right arm in 1797. It made the case for the program's future, and an inflatable version later became a centerpiece of the London 2012 Paralympic Games opening ceremony.
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Thomas Schütte
Born
Model for a Hotel 2007, 2007 to 2009
Unveiled in November 2007, Schütte's work was an enlarged architectural model of a 21-story hotel, its angled, irregular floors made in red, yellow and blue panels. It was the plinth's first boldly colored sculpture, and it swapped the commemorative statue for a proposal: not a memory of the past but a building that might yet be built. Next to Barry's stone and the bronze generals it looked deliberately provisional, which suited a square whose fourth corner had been undecided since 1841.
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One & Other
Antony Gormley, July 6 to October 14, 2009
Gormley put no sculpture on the plinth at all. For 100 days, around the clock, members of the public took it in turns to stand up there for an hour each, 2,400 of them chosen at random, and the project gave the language the word "plinther." What each person did with the hour was up to them, so the results ranged from moving to forgettable. Taken whole, it made the most democratic statement the square has hosted: the pedestal reserved for heroes, handed to whoever's name came up.
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Statue of Sir Keith Park
Temporary statue of Sir Keith Park, November 4, 2009 to May 2010
The one interlude that was not a commission. Between Gormley's people and Shonibare's ship, a fiberglass statue of the New Zealand-born air commander celebrated for his part in the Battle of Britain stood on the plinth for about six months, the closest it has come to holding the kind of hero it was built for. It then went to the RAF Museum, and a permanent bronze by Les Johnson, pictured here, was unveiled in Waterloo Place in 2010, the 70th anniversary of the battle. It is worth knowing as the plinth's road not taken.
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Nelson's Ship in a Bottle
Yinka Shonibare, May 24, 2010 to January 2012
The first commission by a Black British artist, and the first to talk straight back to Nelson on his column. Shonibare built a 1:30 scale replica of HMS Victory and sealed it in a giant bottle, its sails cut from the patterned wax-print textiles people associate with Africa but whose history runs through Indonesian batik and Dutch trade. Empire, trade and London's own mixed population all fit inside one souvenir object. A public appeal kept it in the country, and it now has a permanent home at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
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Elmgreen & Dragset
Powerless Structures, Fig. 101, February 2012 to April 2013
A golden bronze boy, 4.1 meters tall, astride a rocking horse. The Danish-Norwegian duo pitched it as a counterpart to the square's equestrian statues: in place of a king or general frozen mid-victory, a child playing at being one, on a horse that rocks and goes nowhere. It was the first time the plinth got its equestrian statue, of a sort, and it gently deflated the whole idea of the mounted hero. It is now at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
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Hahn/Cock
Katharina Fritsch, July 25, 2013 to February 17, 2015
A giant blue cockerel, 4.72 meters of vivid color in a square of gray stone and dark bronze, and the color alone changed how the whole place looked. Fritsch chose the bird for strength and renewal, but the joke was hard to miss: an unofficial emblem of France, crowing in a square that celebrates a British victory over the French. It managed to be cheerful and pointed at once. The work was later acquired by Glenstone and now stands at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
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Hans Haacke
Born
Gift Horse, March 5, 2015 to September 6, 2016
The plinth got the horse it was built for once more, this time minus the king and stripped to a skeleton. Haacke based the bronze on an etching by George Stubbs, a deliberate nod to William IV's never-installed statue, and tied an electronic ribbon to its front leg showing a live ticker from the London Stock Exchange. Money, power and the old equestrian ideal met in one gaunt figure. For anyone who wants the plinth's sharpest political work, this is the one to know.
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David Shrigley
Born
Really Good, September 29, 2016 to March 6, 2018
A bronze hand giving a thumbs-up, the thumb stretched to an absurd length, cast in the same dark patina as the square's serious statues. Shrigley's deadpan humor works on two levels: a plain gesture of encouragement to a city that wanted one, and a sly comment on positive thinking as a public mood. Unveiled three months after the Brexit referendum, it read differently depending on who was looking up at it. Easy to dismiss as a gag, it is the plinth's best proof that a joke can hold its own beside Nelson.
More about David Shrigley13
Michael Rakowitz
Born
The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, March 28, 2018 to 2020
A recreation of the Lamassu, the winged bull and protective deity that stood at the Nergal Gate of Nineveh from about 700 BC until ISIS destroyed it in 2015, rebuilt from 10,500 empty cans of Iraqi date syrup. The cans stand for a once-renowned industry wrecked by the Iraq wars, so a single figure carries two losses, ancient and modern. Among the square's monuments to empire, it brought a destroyed monument of another civilization back into public view, and it remains the most moving use of the plinth to look outward from London.
More about Michael Rakowitz14
The End (sculpture)
Heather Phillipson, July 30, 2020 to September 2022
A giant dollop of whipped cream topped with a cherry, a fly and a drone, the drone filming passers-by and streaming the footage to a website. At 9.4 meters it was the tallest work the program had shown. Due in March 2020, it was postponed when the country went into lockdown and arrived with a quiet reveal that July, which gave its title and its mood of excess on the brink of collapse an extra edge. The fly and the drone keep it from being mere sweetness: the square was being watched back.
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Samson Kambalu
Antelope, September 28, 2022 to 2024
Kambalu restaged a 1914 photograph of the Baptist preacher and pan-Africanist John Chilembwe beside the European missionary John Chorley, with one telling change of scale: Chilembwe stands almost twice Chorley's size. In the photo he wears a hat, defying the colonial rule that forbade Africans from wearing hats in front of white people, and the following year he led an uprising against British rule in Nyasaland, now Malawi. In a square full of imperial figures, it puts a man the empire tried to erase on the pedestal, and it does so with quiet dignity rather than rhetoric.
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Teresa Margolles
Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant), September 18, 2024 to 2026
A block covered in plaster casts of the faces of 726 trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people, cast by the Mexican artist with community groups in Mexico City, Juárez and London. It pays tribute to her friend Karla La Borrada, a trans singer murdered in Ciudad Juárez. The plaster was left open to the weather, so the faces were meant to soften and fade during their time in the square. Where earlier works added a figure to the city's monuments, this one let the city wear it down, an unusually direct way of talking about who gets remembered.
More about Teresa Margolles17
Tschabalala Self
Lady in Blue, from September 10, 2026
The 16th commission and the one standing there now: a bronze figure of a young, metropolitan woman, her dress painted a vibrant blue and her accessories replicating lapis lazuli. She is no one in particular, an everyday Londoner given the height and permanence the square once kept for admirals and kings, and she strides rather than poses. It is the most direct answer yet to the question the plinth always asks about who gets a statue. After its stay in Trafalgar Square, the sculpture is due to move permanently to Fornebu in Norway.
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