By Tessa Nolan
When Tschabalala Self’s Lady in Blue is craned onto the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square this September, it will mark a quiet revolution in one of the world’s most visible public art commissions. Not because of spectacle – the 10-foot bronze figure, patinated in lapis lazuli blue, is relatively restrained by Fourth Plinth standards – but because of intention. Self is not asking us to admire a king, mourn a tragedy, or decode an abstraction. She is asking us to see ourselves.
“She is not an idol to venerate or a historic figurehead to commemorate,” Self has said. “She is a woman striding forward into our collective future with ambition and purpose. She is a Londoner, who represents the city’s spirit.”
It is a deceptively simple proposition. And it is exactly what the Fourth Plinth needs.
From an Empty Pedestal to a Global Stage
The plinth was never supposed to be empty. Built in 1841, it was designed to hold an equestrian statue of King William IV, part of Sir Charles Barry’s original masterplan for Trafalgar Square. But funding fell through, and the pedestal sat bare for over 150 years – an accidental monument to bureaucratic inertia.
The turning point came in 1994, when Prue Leith, then chair of the Royal Society of Arts, wrote a letter to the Evening Standard suggesting that something ought to be done about the void. The letter ignited a public debate that simmered for five years before the first commission appeared: Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo, a life-sized figure of Christ placed on the plinth in 1999. It lasted three years. Then the plinth was bare again.
It was revived in 2005 under the Mayor of London’s Fourth Plinth Programme, and has since hosted 14 temporary installations – from Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005) to Samson Kambalu’s Antelope (2022). Each work occupies the plinth for roughly two years, though some runs have been shorter. The programme is funded by the Mayor of London with support from Arts Council England and Bloomberg Philanthropies, but the independent Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group – chaired by writer and broadcaster Ekow Eshun – makes all decisions without political interference.
The result is arguably the most important rotating public art commission on earth. A shortlist of seven international artists was announced in 2024, with the public invited to vote. Over 10,000 people did. The commissioning group, which includes the artist Jeremy Deller, broadcaster Jon Snow, and Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick, ultimately chose Self’s Lady in Blue for 2026 and Andra Ursuţa’s spectral green horseman Untitled for 2028.
The Making of Lady in Blue
Self, born in Harlem in 1990, trained at Bard College and Yale School of Art. She is best known for mixed-media depictions of Black female figures – layered, tactile works combining paint, fabric, and recycled materials into what she calls a “painting language.” Her work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, the Hammer Museum, MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2017, she had her first UK solo show at the Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art in London, a city she credits as pivotal to her development.
“I had my first institutional show here, and later the first presentation of my first major painting series,” Self said. “The city has truly supported my artistic development and is the best possible home for this powerful figure.”
Lady in Blue is cast in bronze – a deliberate reference to the other statues in Trafalgar Square, where generals and monarchs have stood for centuries. But where those figures are rendered in dark, weathered metal, Self’s figure is patinated with lapis lazuli blue, a rare pigment mined from Afghanistan and used since antiquity across North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Titian used it. Vermeer used it. It carries associations of divinity, wealth, and the sacred – associations Self deploys with care.
The sculpture depicts a young woman of colour in a dress and heels, mid-stride. She is not posed. She is not heroic in any classical sense. She is, as Self intends, an everywoman – a walking icon of the everyday. The choice to render her in blue, amid the grey stone and bronze of the square’s existing monuments, ensures she will be impossible to ignore. The selection process itself drew intense public interest – the shortlist of seven international artists sparked widespread debate about what public art should look like in contemporary London, with over 10,000 people casting votes.
What the Fourth Plinth Has Become
To understand why Lady in Blue matters, it helps to understand what the Fourth Plinth has become in its 27-year history: a site where London argues with itself about who it is.
The programme has never been comfortable. Katharina Fritsch’s giant blue cockerel, Hahn/Cock (2013), turned the square’s testosterone into a punchline. Michael Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2018), a recreation of an ancient Assyrian lamassu destroyed by ISIS, was a confrontation with cultural erasure. Heather Phillipson’s THE END (2020) – a towering whipped cream topped with a fly and a cherry – arrived during the pandemic and felt like a dare. As we’ve explored in our analysis of the Fourth Plinth as a showcase of artistic diversity and social change, each commission rewrites the terms of engagement between art and the public.
Most recently, Teresa Margolles’s Mil Veces un Instante (2024) placed the plaster-cast faces of 726 trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people onto the plinth in the form of a tzompantli, the skull racks of Mesoamerican civilisations. The casts, made in Mexico City, Juárez, and London, were infused with the participants’ hair and skin cells. Margolles, who trained as a forensic pathologist and worked as a mortician, intended the work as both a memorial and a provocation – a display of resilience at a time when trans communities face escalating hostility worldwide.
Margolles’s installation will be removed to make way for Self’s in September. The two works could not be more different in method or tone – one communal and funereal, the other individual and forward-looking – yet they share a conviction that the plinth should speak to the present, not the past.
Why Representation on a Pedestal Changes Things
There is a long tradition of placing monuments to powerful men on pedestals in London. The three plinths flanking Nelson’s Column hold statues of George IV, Charles James Napier, and Henry Havelock – all figures associated with military conquest and imperial expansion. The Fourth Plinth was, in its original design, meant to continue that tradition. Its transformation into a space for contemporary art is itself a statement: that public space should reflect public life, not just state power.
Self’s Lady in Blue extends this logic. By placing an anonymous young woman of colour where a king was supposed to stand, the work rewrites the grammar of the plinth without erasing its history. The bronze material connects her to the square’s existing language of commemoration; the lapis lazuli colour distinguishes her from it. She is both part of the tradition and a challenge to it.
Justine Simons, the deputy mayor for culture and the creative industries, has described the Fourth Plinth as “the world’s most renowned sculpture commission,” adding that Self’s work will “inspire Londoners, tourists and art lovers alike, bringing a bold, contemporary presence to this historic space.”
The language is careful, diplomatic. But the substance is radical. Every two years, the Fourth Plinth asks a simple question: who deserves to be seen? Self’s answer – an ordinary woman, striding forward, rendered in the colour of the sacred – is as persuasive as any the programme has produced.
What Comes Next
Lady in Blue will remain on the plinth for 18 months, before being succeeded in 2028 by Andra Ursuţa’s Untitled – a spectral green horseman made of resin. Ursuţa, a Romanian-born, London- and New York-based artist, has described the work as a meditation on history and public space: “My work deals with history; history makes sense of us as we try to make sense of it. Trafalgar Square is a place where multiple histories face one another in an open-ended standoff.”
The pairing is fitting. Where Self looks forward, Ursuţa looks sideways – at the tensions and contradictions that accumulate in any space claimed by power. Together, the two commissions suggest that the Fourth Plinth programme, now entering its third decade, is not running out of things to say.
Since 1999, 15 works have appeared on the plinth. Some have been purchased for permanent collections – Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle now sits outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Others have vanished into storage. All of them have done what public art at its best does: interrupted the daily routines of thousands of people and asked them to look up.
Self’s Lady in Blue will do the same. When she arrives in September, she will stand in a square designed for empire and ask it to make room for something else – not a monument to what London was, but a figure of what it is.
The Artist Behind the Blue
Self’s trajectory mirrors the city’s embrace of her. Since her 2017 London debut at Parasol unit, her profile has risen steadily. Her 2022 solo show Make Room at Le Consortium in Dijon was her first major European museum presentation; it travelled to Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in 2023. In 2024, she created a site-specific installation on the High Line in New York, and in 2025, solo shows at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne and the Longlati Foundation in Shanghai.
Her work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the LUMA Foundation in Zurich, among others. She was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2016.
Now she joins a lineage that includes Antony Gormley, David Shrigley, and Hans Haacke. The Fourth Plinth has never been about permanence. It is about the moment – the conversation a single work can start in the mind of someone passing through. Self’s Lady in Blue will begin that conversation in September. For 18 months, she will stand where a king was supposed to be, and she will be enough.
