22 Bishopsgate: Signature Atrium Artworks

The Details

*Consultancy was appointed by Lipton Rogers Developments to devise and deliver two new artist commissions for 22 Bishopsgate, the City of London’s tallest tower. Encouraging a sense of wellbeing in the workplace and within the wider context of the City, the building has developed a cultural programme that places craft and the hand-made at the centre of its ethos.

This vertical village’s tower is machine-made of glass and steel, but its base incorporates three storeys of art and craft into its design, creating an interface between the building and the street. It is here that the building most fully integrates art as an agent for the creative exchange of ideas. The Workplace is designed to support a more creative workforce. Art and craft sit alongside the multiple spaces of various uses that provide convenience and choice to the employees, enriching the well-being of tenants and their visitors, as well as the City streetscape. 

Karine Laval, Heterotopia, 2020
Heterotopia was commissioned for the reception spaces of 22 as part of an on-going series in which Laval documents public and private gardens across the world. In her first site-specific commission in the UK, Laval investigates the process of image making, surface and materiality with a practice that combines analogue and digital technologies. By manipulating colour, cropping imagery and skewing perspectives, the resulting images shift between reality and representation, moving towards abstraction and dissolution of the image. Shifts in perspective are at the heart of the installation, which plays with scale and the magnitude of the triple‐height public spaces, transforming the lobby into a fantastical garden.

Ryan Mosley, Bishopsgate Fringe, 2020
A series of 10 artworks for the reception area, part wall hanging, part collaged tapestries, the works address 22 as a place of sanctuary. Mosley’s starting point is the blanket – the antithesis of a building structurally, that strangely offers similar qualities of comfort, warmth and security. Each of the works features a human figure and can be read as a deliberately staged work, akin to a stage curtain to the outside world with a changing ‘cast ‘entering stage left, right, above and below. These works will be installed near the library, where people meet and dialogue develops over the course of the working day. Each work is roughly 2m square, consisting of canvas, cotton, silk, linen, felt, print and paint. Ryan Mosley is internationally regarded as a painter and this commission is a new chapter in his practice as he begins working with textiles, with each work hand painted and dyed by the artist.