New art for new London Underground stations

The two new tube stations on the Northern line extension are getting new art installations specially designed for them.

At Battersea Power Station station, Alexandre da Cunha’s work, called Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset, will stretch to almost 100 metres in length running along the length of the ticket hall.

Visualisation, Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset, Alexandre da Cunha at Battersea Power Station.

Da Cunha uses an outdated advertising mechanism – the rotating billboard – to create two friezes which will face each other and are inspired by the former control room at Battersea Power Station and its system of vertical bars that regulated the production and output of electricity into the city.

The friezes will consist of three faces of a different colour, gradually fading from one colour to another over the length of the entire image. The colours have been extracted from photos of London sunsets and sunrises. Throughout the course of the day, the panels will rotate, presenting different combinations of colours into the ticket hall.

For Nine Elms station, Samara Scott — who previously designed a Night tube map cover — has conceived a nine-metre high artwork set into the concrete panels of the ticket hall. Scott’s artwork will take the form of coloured liquid ‘spillages’ in excavated sections of the concrete panels, containing objects and materials collected from the local area.

The work will cover an area of over 100 square metres and incorporate 28 separate panels.

Visualisation, Samara Scott at Nine Elms station

The two new artworks are due to be unveiled when the Northern Line Extension opens in autumn 2021.

The two new permanent artworks by Alexandre da Cunha and Samara Scott were commissioned from a shortlist selected by the Art on the Underground team. Invited artists put forward proposals which were reviewed by Art on the Underground’s Advisory Panel, with one proposal taken forward at each station.