Public Commission "Here and there, 2023" : The juncture of Canning Passage and Victoria Road W8 5RF

We are delighted to announce Nick Hornby’s new sculptural commission to be unveiled in Canning Passage in 2023. Known for sculptures which reveal their imagery from different perspectives, Hornby’s commission will bring the famous, isolated figure of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog into the heart of dense, urban London, concealed and revealed through the silhouette’s synthesis with the curling line famously printed in Tristram Shandy.

Nick Hornby said: ‘Here and There is a sculpture about imagination and the transformative power of objects. The figure of the wanderer is a glitch, piercing the urban setting and making everything around him a majestic landscape: it suggests an environment converted by a figure within it. Tristram Shandy was a perfect reference-point, preoccupied with the frailties of fiction and punctuated by playfully disruptive pseudo-quotation which speaks to my referencing other art in my practice. What results is a sculpture that—from a distance—appears to be a recognisable, romantic figure who, up close, is revealed to be formed out of a ribbon-like, flowing line’.

At 1.8m high, the bronze is just over life-size, another device the artist uses to recalibrate the viewer: from the corner of the eye Here and There could be a real person, subtle scaling tips the experience out of reality. ‘I typically work on a much more monumental scale,’ says Hornby, ‘but Canning Passage is distinctive for its intimacy as an urban space and I wanted to create a figure who—if he doesn’t belong to the urban landscape—can almost belong through his size’.

Hornby's sculptures emerge from the convergence of a postmodern historical perspective and cutting-edge digital technology. Using computer software, he digitally folds silhouettes which quote from art history to create three-dimensional works that, as the viewer moves around them, assume the shape of different, well-known works of art from the past.

This new sculpture commission is funded by Section 106 planning contributions through Kensington and Chelsea Council. The commission responds specifically to the site and belongs both with the surrounding Victorian architecture and David Chipperfield’s contemporary building at One Kensington Gardens. This sculpture is a perfect synthesis of different periods, with eighteenth and nineteenth-century references but also connections to the most contemporary technologies in its fabrication. In the intimate site of Canning Passage, it is an invitation for people to enjoy a quiet moment away from the bustling Kensington High Street in a landscape of their own imagination.