"Shortlist of international artists announced for Trafalgar Square's 4th Plinth
25-7-2003

Today the Mayor's 4th Plinth Commissioning Group announced the six artists who have been shortlisted to create a contemporary artwork for the vacant 4th Plinth in Trafalgar Square. The six artists - Chris Burden, Sokari Douglas Camp, Stefan Gec, Sarah Lucas, Thomas Schütte and Marc Quinn - have been selected from a long list of national and international practitioners across diverse art forms and styles.

The 4th Plinth Commissioning Group, under acting chair Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, will commission a temporary piece of art for the 4th Plinth in the North West corner of the newly pedestrianised Trafalgar Square. The commissioned artwork will be displayed on the 4th Plinth for between 12 to 18 months as the first piece of art in a rolling programme. The 4th Plinth project has been developed following the previous initiative by the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce) and recommendations made to the Government by Sir John Mortimer’s Advisory Group on the 4th plinth.

Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, said: 'The 4th Plinth project is integral to my vision for Trafalgar Square of becoming London’s new focal point for cultural excellence and activity. This shortlist of six internationally renowned artists represents a great range of vision and approach.

'The 4th Plinth project aims to create interest, excitement and debate. It will do this by working with these leading artists to develop artworks that will stimulate debate, challenge perceptions of public art and create new and imaginative pieces.

'Public participation and access will be key to the success of the 4th Plinth project and ample opportunities will be given for the public to engage in the commissioning process and express their preferences on the shortlisted proposals.'

The six shortlisted artists will now be commissioned to produce a working model of their proposed piece.

These models will go on public display in the Sainsbury Wing foyer at the National Gallery during December 2003 and January 2004. The winning artwork will be announced by the Mayor in Spring 2004.

The selection of the final artwork will be accompanied by an extensive programme of public participation. In the Sainsbury Wing foyer there will be terminals where visitors can view information about the nominated artists, their previous work and explore the ideas that informed their proposals for the 4th Plinth. Visitors will also be able to record their responses to the shortlisted pieces. This online information and debate will also be accessible to national and international audiences through a dedicated 4th Plinth website. As many people as possible will be encouraged to view the six proposals either at the exhibition or via the web and to express their preferences on the shortlisted proposals.

'The artwork on the 4th Plinth will be an exciting addition to the redeveloped Trafalgar Square, further establishing it as the vibrant home of the best in British and international art. Sitting at the head of Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery has a long tradition of bringing the greatest paintings to the public and delivering high quality education programmes. The National Gallery is delighted to be hosting the exhibition of the 4th Plinth shortlist so that the public can fully explore the six proposals, record their reactions and learn about the artists and their art.' Charles Saumarez Smith, Director of the National Gallery

During January 2004, the Mayor’s 4th Plinth Commissioning Group will launch a series of talks and debates to inform and involve the public in the selection of the artwork and in the cultural activity focused on Trafalgar Square.

The aim is to fund this access programme through educational trusts and business involvement.

The London office of Arts Council England has agreed partnership support for the 4th Plinth project of £80k a year for 2003/04 and 2004/05. The partnership between the London office of Arts Council England and the Greater London Authority focuses on the aim to enrich the cultural life of the capital and to realise the enormous potential for public engagement with art.

Lady Hollick, Chair of the London regional council of Arts Council England, said: 'London is not a museum piece, it is always changing. This constant sense of transformation - where the historic and the contemporary sit side by side, distinct in their diversity yet combining to produce a fresh landscape - makes London a great world city. I congratulate the Mayor on his exciting vision for the redevelopment of Trafalgar Square. We are delighted to be part of a project which is bold in its artistic ambition and which - at its heart - aims to encourage Londoners to engage with the arts and with their environment in new ways.'

The 4th Plinth Commissioning Group are:

Acting Chair: Sandy Nairne - Director of the National Portrait Gallery.

Members: Michaela Crimmin - Head of Arts, RSA; Greg Hilty - Director, Visual Arts and Literature, Arts Council England, London; Diane Henry Lepart - Banker, member of the Mayor’s Culture Strategy Group; James Lingwood - Director, Artangel Trust; Sunand Prasad, Architect, Partner in Penoyre and Prasad; Richard Rieser - Disability advisor; Jon Snow – Broadcaster; Sally Williams - Freelance consultant, Public Art; Bill Woodrow - Artist, previously exhibited work on 4th Plinth.

The Curator of the 4th Plinth is Andrea Schlieker

Biographies for the six shortlisted artists

Chris Burden
Chris Burden was born in Boston in 1946. He studied architecture, physics and visual art at the University of California before beginning to exhibit in 1971. Chris Burden is an enormously influential conceptual artist who received instant fame with a performance piece called Shoot in which a friend, at his request, shot him in the arm. Since then his work has investigated the workings of money, power, military might, and - especially - technology.

Chris Burden is best known in the UK for his scale model of the Tyne Bridge made in Meccano for B.OPEN. Tyne Bridge (2002) is the sixth of Burden's series of model bridges which are made using massive quantities of both Meccano and Erector Set parts.

Chris Burden lives and works in California.

Sokari-Douglas Camp
Sokari Douglas Camp was born in 1958 in Buguma, Nigeria. She went to the California College of Art and Craft, and then graduated in 1983 from the Central School, London, before gaining a Masters in sculpture from the Royal College of Art, in 1986. The established sculptor, who works in welded steel, fuses the realities of London and Nigeria and raises questions about the world we live in. Many of her sculptures make direct references to the masquerade tradition of the Kalabari, including such works as Big Masquerade with Boat and Household on his Head and Otopo Masquerade, both of which are currently on display in the new Sainsbury African Galleries at the British Museum.

In 1998 her Brit Flag was displayed in the street level window of a firm of solicitors located on the Strand, London. Two life-size female figures dressed as athletes hold a large Union Jack made from perspex. On the face of one of the athletes the Jamaican flag is painted, on the other the Nigerian flag. As with Big Masquerade, the figures are made from welded sections of steel and share the same rough surface texture of all her work. The work addresses the image of victorious black sports stars draped in the Union Jack, a familiar feature to the sports pages of the British press, where little thought is given to the divided allegiances they might feel as black people living in Britain.

Sokari-Douglas Camp lives and works in London.

Stefan Gec
Stefan Gec was born in Huddersfield in 1958 and studied fine art at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle upon Tyne and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Since 1989 he has been engaged in the production of a number of site-specific and process-based artworks which explore his relationship to British and European culture as a Briton of Ukrainian origin. These include Bitter Waters, Mews, Lure, Mews & Lure, Trace Elements, Detached Bell Tower, Natural History and Buoy which is third in the series of pieces which take their inspiration and materials from a quantity of metal plate salvaged by Stefan Gec from decommissioned Soviet submarines being broken up for scrap in the English port of Blyth after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Stefan Gec lives and works in London.

Sarah Lucas
Sarah Lucas was born in London in 1962. She studied at the London College of Printing, and Goldsmiths College, London. Lucas works with a variety of materials and media, including photographs, sculpture and installations. Her work often features images of herself in a confrontational stance. Challenging sexual stereotypes, her representations of women and men use humour and a colloquial vocabulary to challenge accepted notions of morality.

Recent exhibitions include The Old In Out, Barbara Gladstone, New York (1998), Real Life: New British Art, Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts and tour, Japan (1999), and The Fag Show, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2000). Sarah Lucas will be exhibiting at Tate in 2004.

Sarah Lucas lives and works in London.

Marc Quinn
Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1986 and had his first solo show in 1988 at the Jay Jopling/Otis Gallery, London. Marc Quinn gained notoriety with his work Self (1991), a refrigerated cast of his own head made using nine pints of his own blood. Since then, Quinn has produced a diverse range of work, most of which is preoccupied with the ever-changing physical states of the body. Increasingly his work addresses ideas concerning mortality and survival in our age of cloning and genetic manipulation.

He was selected for the Sydney Biennial in 1992 and was represented in Young British Artists II at the Saatchi Gallery in 1993 and was part of the Saatchi Gallery Sensation in 1997. In June 2001 Quinn won the Royal Academy’s £25,000 Charles Wollaston prize for the most distinguished work in the summer exhibition. The National Portrait Gallery recently commissioned Quinn to produce a portrait of Sir John Sulston (former director of the Sanger Centre and a leading contributor to the Human Genome Project). Quinn took a sample of Sulston’s DNA to make the portrait which is an exact representation of its subject.

Marc Quinn lives and works in London.

Thomas Schütte
Born in Oldenburg, Germany in 1954, Thomas Schütte is one of the most important artists of his generation. Since the 1970s he has produced a diverse body of work, including surreally distorted figurative sculpture, architectural models, ceramics as well as exquisite watercolours.

Schütte's art often looks utilitarian or appears to offer sustenance, shelter and companionship. He uses a wide spectrum of colours and materials to reinterpret the basic constituents - natural, cultural, political - of everyday life whilst exploring fundamental questions about the artist and society.

Thomas Schütte has had solo exhibitions at many important international public institutions including DIA Center for the Arts, New York; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Fundacao Serralves, Portugal; Kunsthalle, Hamburg and ARC, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. He was included in Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany.

Thomas Schütte lives and works in Dusseldorf"