Mark Wallinger

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.