Create London and Westminster City Council will present a new public art and architecture commission by artist Louise Giovanelli at St. Mary le Strand Church on the recently pedestrianised Strand Aldwych, opening on 19 November 2025 and on view to the public until 18 January 2026.
Responding to James Gibb’s iconic St Mary le Strand Church, the large-scale, site-specific work titled Decades will cover the south-facing façade in a composite image of a draped curtain, producing a sculptural trompe-l’œil form. The temporary intervention is intended to draw attention to this overlooked architectural jewel, the first English Baroque church in the UK. Lit up by night, the work will create an atmospheric and illuminating experience during the darker winter months by altering the visual perception of the historic church, which recently marked its 300th anniversary at the heart of one of London’s most vibrant and busy locations.
Louise Giovanelli (b. 1993, London) is one of the most exciting emerging painters of her generation. Since graduating from the Manchester School of Art in 2015 and Staedelschule in 2020, Giovanelli has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally with recent solo shows including The Hepworth Wakefield and Museum Villa Stuck, Germany. Reworking and often closely cropping details from paintings, photographs, classical sculpture, architecture and theatre, Giovanelli’s work employs repetition to achieve an augmented sense of reality. Deeply engaged with the history of architecture, the artist explores overlooked details in historical buildings through a process she terms ‘slow looking’. By concealing and revealing details, Giovanelli makes the viewer look again and reconsider the world around us.
Once the tallest and most prominent architectural marker in the area and set on the processional route between St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, St Mary le Strand is now dwarfed by larger, surrounding buildings and situated amongst the many theatres and performing arts venues in Strand Aldwych. Playing on the duality of religious and performance-based congregation, Giovanelli is using a composite image of a shimmering curtain, typically found across the remaining working men’s clubs in England. She employs the image to envelope the building, creating a striking contrast of materialities between soft drapery and hard stonework. As a magnified and digitally augmented image, the curtain mimics qualities of a pointillist painting, bearing references to painting practice of Giovannelli and the tradition of painted drapery in Italian Renaissance churches, which Gibbs would have seen on his study trip to Italy before returning to the UK to design St Mary le Strand.
The artwork also draws attention to the church’s exposure to air pollution, emphasising the two-coloured columns resulting from its decades-long exposure to heavy traffic as a busy gyratory before the pedestrianisation of Strand Aldwych in 2022. By revealing details of the alternating colour patterns of the columns, while also covering up areas with fabric, Giovanelli uses different types of translucency to both eclipse and reframe architectural elements while embedding the church at the core of the artwork. The repetitive qualities of scaffolding, used for this installation as the structural component, become another method for the artist to explore the qualities of St Mary le Strand through her unique artistic lens.
Decades is commissioned by Create London for Westminster City Council, and developed with support from David Chipperfield Architects. The commission is made possible thanks to Westminster City Council’s lead support, and with additional sponsorship support from London Heritage Quarter, Liberty and White Cube. St Mary le Strand church and the Diocese of London have been vital in-kind contributors to the project.
Liberty’s iconic Ianthe design has been layered on a composite image to form the final artwork for St Mary le Strand in collaboration with Louise Giovanelli – Ianthe design is copyright © Liberty Fabric Limited.
Marie Bak Mortensen, Director of Create London, said: We are delighted to be working with Louise Giovanelli and Westminster Council on this commission, which aims to make the familiar unfamiliar, providing a new way of connecting audiences across culture and congregation. A key objective of the commission is to create an exciting and visually stimulating experience for visitors while increasing public knowledge of our built heritage. A heritage that is – like today – richly informed and influenced by cultures beyond our own borders. It also cleverly highlights how climate change and a lack of care pose risks to our built environment and all the rich layers of history it contains.”