Artist Prem Sahib, who grew up in Southall, is set to unveil Bronze Apotropaic, his first major public sculpture, in the front gardens of Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery in Ealing this week.
The work by the 43-year-old officially opens to the public on 26 June 2025 and will remain on display until 21 September 2025.
Installed in front of the historic house designed by Sir John Soane, the sculpture introduces a quietly subversive presence: two hooded sweatshirts, one suspended above the other in a pose that hints at care, protection or disappearance.
The sculpture, which stands at 1.5 metres high, explores clothing as a stand-in for the body.
Sahib said: “I’ve used clothing in my work for many years now, often manipulating and contorting it in ways that suggest the pressures and experience of life in the city, or of encounters between bodies. This new bronze sculpture flirts with more traditional ways of representing the figure in public space, using clothes to suggest a disembodied, scarecrow-like presence.
“It is meaningful to me that my first permanent public commission will have a home in the Borough of Ealing.”
Sahib draws on personal connections to the area – both Walpole Park and Southall, where he was raised – to ground Bronze Apotropaic in a specific social and cultural context. Conceived as a pair of folkloric ‘trickster’ figures, the absent forms disrupt familiar ideas of monumentality and permanence, echoing themes of resistance, queerness and marginalisation.
After its run at Pitzhanger, the sculpture will be moved to a permanent home in Ealing.
The unveiling coincides with Doubles, a new exhibition across Pitzhanger Manor that sees Sahib respond to a heritage setting for the first time. Works such as Apotropaic 1 (2023), Liquid Gold (2016–ongoing) and Front (2017) inhabit and reframe the site, raising questions about who is seen, who is remembered, and who gets to belong.
Richard Parry, head of public programmes at Pitzhanger Manor said: “We are thrilled to unveil ‘Bronze Apotropaic’ at Pitzhanger. Not only does the sculpture mark a key development in the artist’s oeuvre as a substantial work of outdoor public art, but it also draws on personal affiliations with the park and neighbourhood around Pitzhanger, close to where the artist grew up, and which have formed a prominent thread in their artwork over many years.”
