Launching in London this winter, 11 powerful artworks will hit thousands of billboards and outdoor digital screens across London and the four nations, each responding to the theme ‘The State We’re In’.
By taking over advertising space across highstreets, bus stops, cinemas and billboards, the artworks will reach millions of Brits over the four-week run, thrusting the thought-provoking pieces into the heart of public conversations and debates.
Launched in 2022, The Gallery is the brainchild of leading UK arts producers Artichoke and public artist Martin Firrell, conceived in partnership with the Out-of-Home advertising industry, including founding partners Clear Channel and JCDecaux. In its second season, the new outdoor art project continues to make art truly accessible with this bold and unafraid programme that will interact with people’s everyday lives.
The 11 artworks that make up ‘The State We’re In’ have been selected from a global public open call that received almost 1,300 entries, including four commissioned artworks. The works cover mediums including photography, illustration, oil painting, collage, and digital prints. Together the collection represents a variety of responses to the theme, from the personal to the political and from the domestic to the global.
Richard Woods addresses the idea of home and suggests a world turned upside down, while Bobby Baker’s piece takes the form of a revolutionary poster that celebrates the value of domestic labour and care. In quiet contrast, photographer Dola Posh explores her own experience of motherhood during lockdown, a blissful self-portrait brushing her daughter’s hair in a tender moment when the house is still. Award-winning British artist Sarah Maple reflects on the UK’s cost-of-living crisis and the multiple contemporary meanings of cake with a pithy 21st-century reinterpretation of Marie-Antoinette’s often misinterpreted phrase ‘Let them eat cake’.
Fine artist Natasha Klutch interrogates the notion of statehood in her oil painting of Britannia, the enduring symbol of dominance and glory, shown as a shadow of its former self. Hugh Malyon’s work confronts the direct impact of ableism attitudes and the repetitive narratives surrounding disabled bodies, and the one-size fits all approach taken by society. Exploring vulnerability on his own terms, the digitally-created work shows Hugh’s own body multiplied and crammed into a sardine can, a symptom and a cause of the state we’re in. S. Mark Gubb’s luminous textual work comments on a capitalist-driven world that increasingly values profit and personal advancement above all else, and the division and catastrophe this can lead to.
In her collage of found images, US artist HEYDT, reveals the uncertainties of a world exploited beyond use, thanks to resource depletion, climate change and the spread of misinformation, while fellow US artist Allyson Packer considers our relationship with a world in crisis through a poignant photograph of a classic mid-Western landscape that suggests the only suitable response is to cry, eliciting a collective cathartic release. Welsh community artists, Becca + Clare, in collaboration with a group of young people from The Trinity Centre Arts Club, who have experienced, or are experiencing, the asylum system in Cardiff presents a photographic piece that depicts a domestic scene constructed entirely out of cardboard, representing the fragility and transitional state of the migrant experience.
Finally, Glaswegian artist Trackie McLeod bridges the gap between fine art and design, poking fun at British nostalgia and using humour as social commentary in a textual piece that sums up the state of anxiety in which we currently live.
Artichoke’s CEO and Creative Director, Helen Marriage, said: “When we originally conceived this second theme for The Gallery, little did we realise how apposite and prescient it would be. The 11 artists in this exhibition together tell an important story about the world we live in now. Working with our Out-of-Home colleagues, this gallery without walls sets out to reach people as they go about their daily lives, offering up great art and asking difficult questions.
Public art can be innocuous or it can provoke debate and challenge people to think about what it means. For me, all these works do this in different ways, and I’m excited to see what the reaction will be.” Martin Firrell, Creative Director of The Gallery said: “The Gallery invites artists to engage with themes that are important to the majority of people. My hope for Season 2 is that by sharing the challenges that face us all, we can feel more able to cope. I hope we can raise spirits, of course. And also raise the magnificent spirit of protest. For me, the artists of Season 2 are saying 'we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore'. You might be feeling the same way. Join us.”
Bren O’Callaghan, Curator, The Gallery said: “The inaugural season of The Gallery announced our arrival and intent: to commission new artworks for digital screens and billboards across the UK, at thousands of locations in all four nations, giving cause for meaningful reflection of differing viewpoints. For Season 2 the successful artists have drawn from a variety of subjects and causes, evidencing the overlapping, intersectional nature of art-and-activism. By co-opting sites within the city fabric most commonly associated with information, instruction and persuasion, Season 2 of The Gallery proposes alternative routes in a lifelong journey - one that yet skirts cliff edges, catastrophe and bonfires of our own making.”
Each biannual exhibition season is produced by Artichoke and sets out to nurture and develop artists at all levels, giving them a platform and guidance on producing art in the public realm. Season 2 sees the addition of a Learning and Participation programme which includes the artwork created in collaboration with artists Becca + Clare and young people from The Trinity Centre Arts Club in Cardiff. In addition, alongside local artists, The Gallery will be running workshops in Wales and Northern Ireland for young people who will have the opportunity to learn about art in the public space and create their own piece of work in response to the theme, ‘The State We’re In’.
The public will have the opportunity to purchase their favourite artworks as prints with 60% of all profits going directly to the artists. The exhibition and artists will be further supported by a dedicated website and digital archive.