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Even the merest dabblers in London’s art scene should be familiar with the work of Thomas J Price.
His Reaching Out sculpture — a bronze portrait of a young woman on her phone — helped redefine the concept of the statue for the 21st century, with its comments on our relationship with technology, and the marginalisation of Black women.
Certainly, you’ll remember the artist after craning your neck up at his monumental new sculpture, just unveiled outside the V&A East museum, which itself is set to open this April.
Soaring 18ft into the Stratford skies, A Place Beyond is (perhaps unsurprisingly) Price’s tallest sculpture to-date. True to his ‘everyperson’ style, the fictionalised young person it depicts is conspicuously casual, wearing trainers, jeans and a baggy t-shirt. Explains Gus Casely-Hayford, V&A East Director on the thinking behind the commission: “V&A East Museum is for everyone – I want you to feel that this space is for you.”
As with Reaching Out, the subject also has a phone in their hand. A V&A press release explains they’re “looking out to a horizon full of possibilities”, although we like to think that, in true Londoner style, they can’t be bothered to schlep to the other side of town, and are thinking up an excuse about why they can’t make it out tonight.
A Place Beyond should certainly do the job of setting tongues wagging about the latest V&A museum, which opens on 18 April, with the free Why We Make Galleries (containing over 500 objects from the V&A’s collections spanning art, architecture, design, performance and fashion), as well as inaugural paid-for exhibition, The Music is Black: A British Story.
Sister venue V&A East Storehouse — which we deemed “instantly one of London’s great museums” — opened nearby last year.
Price’s lofty sculpture, meanwhile, will surely become one of THE rendezvous for people meeting up in the area: “I’m standing next to the really, really big person.”
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