New mosaic artwork appears in St James’s Park tube station

A new mosaic artwork has appeared in St James’s Park tube station, right by the steps down from the Broadway entrance.

Angels of History is composed of six panels, each measuring 1.5 x 1 metres, and explores how the themes of public space, architecture, state infrastructure, gender, and sexual identity interact with one another.

The artwork was created by the London-based duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings. Quinlan and Hastings’s paintings depict various power dynamics, class and social relations, and positions of authority playing out in public space, raising the question: Who does the street belong to?

Angels of History is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), which describes Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus as an image of the “angel of history.”

Quinlan and Hastings’s work centres on two triptychs featuring androgynous, angelic figures, whose ambivalent gazes turn towards one another and fall over passing travellers. The pair reflected on the angels of the Old Testament, who were “at once sublime and terrible to behold.”

The figures are set against an uncanny landscape of rolling hillsides. The pair painted full-scale frescos, produced in Cornwall, as a template for the final work. Cornwall’s wild and ancient landscape, particularly Zennor’s megalithic pagan monuments, influenced the artwork’s barren, sparsely populated landscape, which speaks to an ecology in crisis, a future in which few relics of humanity persist.

Architecture also plays an important role in Quinlan and Hastings’s practice, as a force that shapes people’s behaviour and desires. The work depicts isolated buildings: a row of post-war terraced houses, Art Deco skyscrapers, and 55 Broadway. Post-war housing, which frequently appears in their work, relates to Benjamin’s perspective of what emerges from the rubble of history.

The artwork is a permanent addition to the tube station and can be seen if you use the main Broadway entrance. It was commissioned by Art on the Underground.