The Triumph of Art at Trafalgar Square: Artist Jeremy Deller is Hosting a Massive Free Street Party in Central London
Jeremy Deller, Turner Prize winner and all-round art world icon, is throwing a massive, one-day street party in Trafalgar Square. Taking place on Saturday July 26, it's called The Triumph of Art, and it's shaping up to be a joyful, chaotic blowout of banners, brass bands, inflatables, puppets and public performance. No tickets. No barriers. Just turn up.
The event marks the end of the National Gallery's 200th birthday celebrations and is the culmination of two years of projects across the UK. Deller has very much been part of those anniversary celebrations, being part of collaborations in Derry, Dundee, Plymouth and Llandudno. Each of those places staged its own art event earlier this year, and now it all comes together for one big finale in central London.
The party will start with a procession up Whitehall at 11am which will wind its way into Trafalgar Square, where things will keep going until 4pm. Expect music, performances, workshops, banners, costumes and, crucially, a giant puppet called Quingo Starlequinn. This towering creation was built by learning disability arts collective Do Your Own Thing, and there'll be DJs performing from inside it throughout the day.
Deller has called the event 'a big fête/bacchanal-type thing' and says it's about rethinking who makes art, what it looks like, and where it belongs. This isn't a stuffy gallery show. It's a noisy, funny, generous invitation to be part of something together.
Whether you come for the spectacle, the music, or just to say you saw a DJ puppet in Trafalgar Square, The Triumph of Art is a chance to loosen up and do something properly unexpected at a London landmark. You can find more details about what to expect here.
Did you hear? London is the best city in Europe for students.
Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news and reviews to events and trends. Just follow our Time Out London WhatsApp channel.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
2 days ago
- Spectator
How not to behave at a London gentleman's club
After a 5 a.m. start, I arrived at the departure gate in Nice airport to discover there was an air traffic control strike and my flight had been delayed by two hours. Annoyance gave way to relief when the board turned red and all later flights were cancelled. This was the week of the Spectator summer party and, because of work commitments and for reasons of economy, I was flying back at 5 p.m. the following day. I was packing a lot into those hours: on arrival a late lunch in Pimlico, where I was staying in a flat belonging to a friend, Kate, who was away; the party; a hungover breakfast with Will, The Spectator's features editor, the following morning; a solitary wander round the National Gallery and lunch with Martin Vander Weyer, before a dash back to the airport. But an hour before the party my return flight the following afternoon was cancelled. The first available seat on any airline was three days later. What was I going to do? No laptop, no notebook, no sketchpad, no money, no book even. No clothes either. All I'd brought was a change of outfit for the party: my poshest frock and daft pointy kitten-heeled shoes. For travelling I was wearing a long black Uniqlo dress and a lime-green Brora linen utility jacket. On my feet, a pair of silver-striped Adidas Sambas. I'd forgotten to wear or bring socks. At home in Provence during the summer I live in flip-flops or Teva sandals, but I'd read flip-flops are verboten in the city and didn't take any. London was tropical. With the new flight booked and with only minutes to spare, I rushed to get ready for the party and headed out. I was supposed to be meeting Wild Life columnist Aidan Hartley and his girlfriend in the pub for pre-drinks but missed them. Apart from the anxiety and shame of having, I think, inadvertently offended a Lord, the evening was a blast. I woke early next morning to a text: 'Where did you get to?' After I explained, Aidan told me he was having lunch at the Savile Club and would be lounging around smoking all afternoon and asked if I'd like to join him, adding that he'd buy me a cigar. I'd never been in a proper London club before. How could I refuse? But would they let me, a trainer-wearing, lower-middle-class former nurse with no university education, in? To save money I walked everywhere. It was hotter than Provence. On the way from Pimlico to breakfast in Old Queen Street, and then again en route to lunch after the National Gallery, I had to buy plasters. My youngest daughter said to me recently: 'Mum, you should stop reading the fashion pages of the Times, you know it only makes you miserable.' How right she was. I yearned for flip-flops. By mid-afternoon when I reached the club and rang the bell, my feet were bleeding. I smiled at the woman behind the reception desk, willing her not to notice my footwear, and, seeing Aidan with a book in the room beyond, scurried towards him. 'Come and see the portraits,' he said, taking me into a fine room, the walls of which were covered in sketches of past members. Old friends Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats were there; Robert Louis Stevenson too. I was overcome with an indescribable emotion – just the kind of thing which would be unwelcome in a gentleman's club. I declined the offer of a cigar but accepted a large gin and tonic. Outside on the shaded terrace groups of men sat drinking and smoking. I don't know what I expected but the ambience, well-dressed, flamboyant, conservative, and atmosphere of welcoming geniality surprised me. Everyone I met was genuinely charming and interesting. An older man in a beautiful pale-lemon linen jacket spoke to me in quiet kindly tones. The conversation turned to books. Both of the younger men I met had read a favourite of mine, The Rock Pool by Cyril Connolly. Too soon, and many drinks later, Aidan had to leave for a dinner. I said I'd leave too – I'd been out for 12 hours already – but the group urged me to stay and swept me into dinner. Afterwards my young host took me to see the ballroom and, pointing, told me he'd seen a photograph of his mother in that fireplace, where she'd fallen asleep smoking a cigar. It was midnight by the time I got back. The following day was a write-off; the fear, that awful feeling of dread, compounded by headache and nausea. Blisters prevented me from putting shoes on. Instead of visiting the Tate, I lay in bed reading a book I found on a shelf: A.N. Wilson's The Sweets of Pimlico, a dark comic tale of intergenerational love, homosexuality, consensual incest, an IRA bomb and a large inheritance. It preserved my sanity. Lovely books. I left the flat for the airport at four the next morning. The Uber driver asked what I did. 'What do you package your paintings in?' he said. 'If needed, paper bubble wrap and an old cardboard box. Or maybe a towel.' 'No, no. You must buy luxury top-end packaging. I make art on my computer and sell special prints to billionaires. My boxes cost £5,000 each.' London was fabulous, but suddenly I was glad to be going home to the cave.
Times
3 days ago
- Times
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years review — a master rights some wrongs
Andy Goldsworthy is imaginative, inventive, poetic, hard-working, big-hearted and brave. He has been making art for 50 years. Nature loves him, people who have seen his work in books love him, people who go to his exhibitions love him, I love him, my wife loves him, and so do my kids. But for reasons we need to go into, the art establishment does not. Indeed, it ignores him. He has never been nominated for the Turner prize. He's not in the Royal Academy. He hasn't received an MBE or an OBE, let alone been knighted or damed like the Gormleys, Kapoors or Emins. He has never had a show at the Tate or the Hayward. No one has asked him to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. For 50 years Goldsworthy has been making art that touches the heart and delights the eye. But the art establishment can't see it. Why? One reason is that his work is centred on the landscape, and the art establishment, these days, is an urban beast. Sheep don't fret about their identities. Trees don't remember the empire. Farmers don't express themselves with their clothing as relentlessly as Leigh Bowery did, night after night, club after club, in the posthumous show he had recently at Tate Modern. Another problem is the delightful nature of Goldsworthy's art: that it is so easy to love. The gorgeous patterns he finds in autumn leaves, the magical moments he creates with nature's simplest materials, the ecstatic understanding he has of the joy of colour are not neurotic enough to appeal to the art world's tastes. It sees itself as a complex ally of the ego, not a joyous buddy of the id. It hungers for difficulty, rigour, unpleasure. So my advice to the commissars of the art establishment, to Tate directors and Serpentine curators, is to get yourselves to Edinburgh and visit Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years at the Royal Scottish Academy. It's a look at the whole of his lengthy career, but also a statement show that seems determined to stamp out the rumour that he's a softie. The real Andy Goldsworthy — hardcore, thoughtful, mysterious — is being encouraged to emerge. It begins spectacularly with a long and shaggy sheepskin rug running down the centre of the posh stairs that welcome us to the Royal Scottish Academy. Infused with the stony rigour of the Scottish Enlightenment, carved out of local granite, the posh stairs speak of privilege and rank, politeness and empire. Goldsworthy's rug, meanwhile, ascending shaggily step by step, speaks of muddy fields and the dirty bottoms of sheep. Two worlds are colliding, and societal sparks are flying. The attack continues with the next sight, a filigree of delicate lines stretching between the portentous Doric columns that loom over the entrance. What is it? A silk hanging? A beaded embroidery? As you get closer, you finally recognise it: barbed wire. From many fields and with many patinas. For the first time in its unpleasant history, the vicious outdoor fencing has been woven by an industrious spider into a curtain of fragile beauty. • Like nature itself, the show keeps switching moods. Gravestones, a lumpy gallery full of rocks that appear to have emerged from beneath the floor, like the biblical prophecy about the resurrection of the dead at the End of Days, is doomy and gothic. It's made out of stones dug up in the cemeteries of Dumfries and Galloway. But Sheep Paintings, two panels of cosmic swirlings with a perfect circle at their centre, feels druidically mystical, like that installation with the setting sun at Tate Modern by Olafur Eliasson. Goldsworthy's solar discs were actually created by the muddy feet of sheep feeding around a perfectly circular food trough. In his student days Goldsworthy worked on a farm, where he learnt a respect for labour and inherited an appreciation for the seasons. Despite their many moods, his installations are invariably centred on a simple piece of geometry: a circle, a square, a line. Oak Passage seems, from its first angle, to be an impenetrable tangle of branches. But as you walk round you see that its centre is dissected by a miraculously straight path. Man and nature are doing their thing in evident harmony. Most readers will know Goldsworthy's work from the sumptuous photography books he produced in the 1990s. They were popular and are, I suspect, the chief reason the art world took against him: it dislikes crowd-pleasers. Some of those images are on show here as well — a mysterious zigzag in the earth created with the feathers of a heron; a bottomless hole in a tree fashioned from autumn leaves. Rather than shining glossily in a coffee table book, they hang coolly on the gallery walls, part of a thoughtful photographic encapsulation in which the rigour that went into their production is easier to note. They remain beautiful — what a nose he has for the intensity of nature's colours — but their ambition to record a fleeting moment is much more evident. The job of this gorgeous photography is to record a natural performance that would otherwise be lost. All through the event there's a feeling that the artist is trying to right some wrongs: a sense of correction. Here, finally, the truth is being projected that he is, at heart, a minimalist: a lover of geometry's simplest order. But where most minimalists are urbanites, searching for industrial precision with industrial materials, he's a rural minimalist who finds order and simplicity in nature. If it's not there, he inserts it into the chaos. And like all great landscape artists — and he's certainly one of those — he's bringing the outdoors indoors. It's a traditional British ambition. It deserves far greater recognition that it has hitherto received.
Evening Standard
24-07-2025
- Evening Standard
Jeremy Deller is inviting London to a party it won't forget
And with this little tour of these wild and true artworks, we arrive at why Deller is here. Which is that to mark the bicentenary of the National, the Turner Prize winner is holding a huge free party in Trafalgar Square this Saturday. Titled The Triumph of Art, it is a public revelry beginning at 11am with a parade along Whitehall to the square, where a carnival of performances, music and general mayhem will take place. It is the climax to a nationwide series of events by Deller and the National, that have dovetailed with local culture and folklore and politics, such as one in Derry, Northern Ireland which showcased the bands who played there during the Troubles. This final London happening is, quite simply, not to be missed.
