LONDON, March 14 — Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is set to create her first-ever permanent UK installation for the new Liverpool Street station on London’s Elizabeth line.
Kusama’s site-specific work, titled Infinite Accumulation, will feature the artist’s instantly recognisable polka-dot motif, the dots appearing as polished spheres supported and connected by curved rods. Together, these elements will create a series of mirrored steel sculptures that will reach up to 12 metres wide and 10 metres high, guiding passengers from the public spaces outside the station and into its eastern entrance at Broadgate.
Kusama is one of nine artists selected for the Crossrail Art Programme, which is overseeing a series of ten public artworks for seven stations of the soon-to-open Elizabeth line. She is one of the final two artists to be announced, along with British artist Conrad Shawcross, who is also readying a work for the Liverpool Street station in the heart of the City of London.
For his bronze sculpture, Manifold, Shawcross is taking inspiration from musical harmony, using a machine based on the Victorian harmonograph to map the shape of a piano chord as it falls into silence. The resulting “drawing” will be sculpted in three dimensions and will serve as a sort of signpost outside the station’s west entrance at Moorgate.
Kusama and Shawcross’s designs were unveiled at the opening of “Art Capital: Art for the Elizabeth line,” an exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery that is showcasing the ideas of all nine participating artists through May 6. The Elizabeth line is slated to open in December. — AFP-Relaxnews
