Mark Wallinger

In 2009, the BBC announced Mark Wallinger as the winning artist for the Ebbsfleet Landmark Project in an important competition for which eminent artists, among whom were Ricard Deacon and Christopher Le Brun, submitted designs for a work that would be erected in the landscape of Kent in dialogue with Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North. Wallinger’s design was a 50m-high white horse.

The present work is a scaled-down life-sized version in black of the horse, for which already exists a small edition in white marble and resin. The sculpture was made by advanced technology, scanning a horse which the artist part-owned named Rivera Red. Coincidentally, the very day that Wallinger won the Ebbsfleet competition, Rivera Red won his race at Lingfield. 

Wallinger has long been interested in horses and in preparation for his design studied intricately the history of equine representation, from ancient chalk depictions to works by George Stubbs. As the artist notes, ‘there’s still an atavistic love of horses that people in Britain have’. While the design remains hugely popular, due to the financial recession in 2009 the project for the 50m horse was shelved. There is strong hope that the project will find re-ignition as the economy builds with countless digital imagining of the work in situ in the Kent landscape. The artist himself marvels at the idea: ‘this is a normal-sized horse; imagine it enormous!’