Thomas J Price’s Tallest Sculpture Rises Outside London’s V&A East

• Thomas J Price has unveiled , an 18-foot bronze sculpture outside London’s upcoming V&A East.
• The monumental figure reflects Price’s critique of classical sculpture and explores everyday identity and viewer bias.
• The installation launches public programming ahead of V&A East’s opening and new commissions across the site.

Ahead of the opening of London’s V&A East on April 18, the institution has unveiled an outdoor artwork the public can already enjoy—A Place Beyond (2026), by Thomas J Price. At 18 feet tall, it’s the largest sculpture that the British artist has ever produced.

A Place Beyond jives with Price’s established style. Once again, the woman he’s immortalized in timeless bronze isn’t a real person, but a mash-up of found images, 3D scans, and the artist’s own observations. She wears a quotidian ensemble—another one of Price’s calling cards. Her demeanor is casual, her form unidealized. Like this, Price aims to critique classical sculpture and confound, or perhaps expose, viewer biases.

Price grew up in London, and works out of east London—the gritty, gentrifying neighborhood where the V&A East is situated. A Place Beyond marks his fourth sculpture in the area: Reaching Out appeared on the Line, London’s first public art trail, in 2013, followed by Network in 2020 and Warm Shores, installed outside Hackney Town Hall since June 2022.

Although the latter work honors London’s Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants, the other three feature people holding smartphones. A Place Beyond features the sole figure not staring at hers. Its title seems to reference getting offline and out into the real world—or, in this case, the art world. This latest installment follows Price’s U.S. outing last year, when he landed another large sculpture in Times Square in New York.

Of all the sites where Price could have placed his most monumental work to date, the V&A East proves particularly potent. “This commission is especially meaningful to me as I was taken to the V&A as a child with my mother and it has shaped much of my critique of museum collections,” he remarked in press materials. “I’m excited to be part of the next chapter in the V&A’s evolution in east London.” V&A East director Gus Casely-Hayford also told east Londoners, “I want you to feel that this space is for you.” To that end, Price consulted the V&A East Youth Collective while making the work.

Preparations continue at the institution, which has also announced a semi-annual commissions program titled New Work. Each edition will be themed, with the inaugural cohort exploring “east London’s layered histories and creative futures.”

To that end, English artist and stage designer Es Devlin is creating an installation celebrating Russian artist Natalia Goncharova’s settings and costumes for Igor Stravkinsy’s 1910 ballet  at the nearby V&A East Storehouse, which opened last year. American artist Carrie Mae Weems will debut The Long Goodbye (2026), her first project based on the U.K., in the film room amidst the V&A East’s two permanent, free collection galleries. All eight commissions, spreading throughout both sites, will go on view April 18.