Four contemporary artists—Ahmet Öğüt, Agnes Denes, Rory Pilgrim, and Rudy Loewe—will unveil new installations across London’s Tube network as part of the city’s long-standing “Art on the Underground” program.
Since its inception in 2000, the initiative has aimed to make art more accessible while challenging traditional notions of exhibition spaces. This year’s commissions feature a dynamic range of mediums and themes, bringing fresh perspectives to the underground environment.
An artwork by Ahmet Öğüt will be installed in the Stratford Underground Station in March 2025. Saved by the Whale’s Tail, Saved by Art will be a large-scale installation piece made with the collaboration of the New Contemporaries.
The commission is inspired by the “power of art to save lives,” inspired by the true story of an incident in 2020 where a Rotterdam train fell off the tracks, only to be saved by a large sculpture of a whale’s tail.
Beyond the installation itself, part of the project is a public competition for stories that consider the ways in which art saves lives. As a prize, Öğüt created a sculpture resembling a trophy, which will be awarded later in 2025.
An artwork by the Hungarian-American conceptual artist Agnes Denes will be included on the Spring 2025 Pocket Tube Map. Denes has worked across a large range of media and is interested in ecology and public space. She will include an artwork from her series “Map Projections,” where she reimagines the shape of the earth in different maps.
An audio artwork by the British artist and composer Rory Pilgrim will be played over the loudspeakers in the Waterloo Underground station. The artwork was created in conjunction with the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk (CCSaR) program, which seeks to safeguard creative and grassroots cultural endeavors in London.
The piece draws inspiration from communities surrounding the station and spotlights the work of organisations who face structural barriers to sustaining space in the capital. It will be heard in the hallway Northern and Jubilee lines at Waterloo station in early July 2025.
The London-based artist Rudy Loewe will unveil a mural in the Brixton Underground Station in November 2025. As part of the Brixton Mural Program, the artwork will feature Loewe’s distinctive graphic approach to painting, with bold, flat colours and text.
The mural will address the sensorial experience of Brixton, as well as reference Brixton’s role as a gathering place for the community. The mural is ninth in a series of mural commissions since 2018 that respond to the development of the surrounding area and the wider socio-political history of mural making.
