Items17The creator’s order
  1. 1Mark WallingerMark WallingerBorn May 25, 1959Ecce 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…0
  2. 2Bill WoodrowBill WoodrowBorn Nov 1, 1948Regardless 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,…0
  3. 3Rachel WhitereadRachel WhitereadBorn Apr 20, 1963Monument, 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…0
  4. 4Marc QuinnMarc QuinnBorn Jan 8, 1964Alison 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…0
  5. 5Thomas SchütteThomas SchütteBorn Nov 16, 1954Model 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…0
  6. 6One & OtherOne & OtherAntony 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…0
  7. 7Statue of Sir Keith ParkStatue of Sir Keith ParkTemporary 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…0
  8. 8Nelson's Ship in a BottleNelson's Ship in a BottleYinka 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…0
  9. 9Elmgreen & DragsetElmgreen & DragsetPowerless 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…0
  10. 10Hahn/CockHahn/CockKatharina 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…0