Well, you can have a sweet potato, an ice cream van, an equestrian figure draped in green slime or a black cat. Seven models for the vacancies on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2026 and 2028 are on display in the National Gallery, and you can vote for which lucky sculpture gets two years on the most prominent public space in England. But it’s a band of the elite that gets to choose the shortlist, and the only name on the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group I actually recognised is that of Jon Snow, the newsreader.
The space is already filled for the two years from September. It will be occupied by a work called Improntas (Imprints) by Teresa Margolles and features the faces of hundreds of trans people arranged in the shape of a Mesoamerican skull rack. It represents the rights of trans people. Except you wouldn’t necessarily know that, looking at all those faces. Unlike your standard equestrian statue, which only needs a name, job description and date, and unlike Lord Nelson on his pillar, it needs a short essay to make it intelligible.
The Fourth Plinth enables us to contemplate what contemporary sculptors are up to, even if what they’re making is a giant cupcake with a bluebottle on top
But then so does this year’s shortlist. The sprouting sweet potato represents the “global conversation that happens in Trafalgar Square”. The ice cream van represents migration, and it comes with sound effects. The black cat represents the suffragettes. And so on.
What it all goes to show is the wisdom of making the plinth a space for temporary exhibits. The preoccupations of one year don’t necessarily move us the next; this year’s trans activism may give way in two years’ time to migration issues. And in 50 years, who knows? Maybe we’ll return to abstraction, as would probably have been the case if we’d been commissioning 50 years ago.
After 25 years of temporary occupants of the Fourth Plinth, my favourite is still the first: Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo, a curiously moving depiction of a life-sized Christ, looking tiny on that big plinth. It was simple, and effective.
The Fourth Plinth is that valuable thing, a talking point. It enables us to contemplate what contemporary sculptors are up to, even if what they’re making is a giant cupcake with a bluebottle on top. Who knows, we may yet get a perfectly conventional figure on a horse eventually. But for 2026, my money is on the black cat. But that’s simply because it looks like our kitten when she’s cross.
