Every January since 2016, London has been transformed into a dazzlingly luminous landscape by a litany of art installations using light as their paint and the capital city as their canvas.
It’s the Lumiere light festival, which this year ran from the 18th to the 21st of January and featured more than 50 artworks brightening the streets of King’s Cross, through Fitzrovia, Mayfair, and London’s West End, to Trafalgar Square, Westminster, Victoria, South Bank and Waterloo.
Here are seven of the best, many of which were but a short walk from our Residential Land properties.
Grosvenor Square
At the end of the road of our Duke Street property is Grosvenor Square, which took on a Nordic flavour over the weekend with Swedish artist Aleksandra Stratimirovic’s Northern Lights installation. Straimirovic evoked the Aurora Borealis with a series of shimmering cylindrical tubes suspended above the square.
St James’s Square
Katarzyna Malejka and Joachim Slugocki brought all the retro-futuristic spectacle of an 80s light show to St James’s Square with their Spectral work. Throwing jagged neon rays around the square like taught, luminous string, Spectral stands in stark contrast to the trees around which it appears to bend.
Berkeley Square
Mayfair’s Berkeley Square (a mere 6 minute walk from our Hill Street property) came alive with a series of sparkling avian sculptures by French artist Cedric Le Borgne. Titled Was That a Dream?, the bejewelled birds were dotted around the square and on its surrounding buildings, leaving the trees glowing with nocturnal energy.
Granary Square
Granary Square in King’s Cross became eerily animated with a moving light sculpture from Dutch inventor Daan Roosegaarde. Waterlicht illuminated a misty sky with blue lasers to give the impression of waves rolling over the heads of entranced onlookers.
South Bank
Danish company Vertigo installed The Wave on the Riverside Walk of the South Bank. An angular tunnel of 40 glowing triangles, The Wave is an interactive sculpture which responds to movement and sound as people pass through it – giving the impression of a futuristic portal to an unknown destination.
Westminster Abbey
Patrice Warrener’s The Light of the Spirit (Chapter 2) bathed the austere beauty of Westminster Abbey in technicolour brilliance. Using a chromolithe light projection system, Warrener makes it seems as if the Abbey’s intricate sculptural details have been precisely painted with incandescent light.
Covent Garden
One of the smallest and most eye-catchingly unusual installations, Benedetto Bufalino and Benoit Deseille’s surreal Aquarium installation drew crowds throughout the weekend. The quintessential red box is filled with water, goldfish and – of course – light, creating the inherently comical sight of an aquarium decorated with a bulky, old school public telephone.
