Liverpool Biennial and Liverpool BID Company launch Art in Motion
Photo: Helena Geilinger
Artworks will infiltrate daily life in Liverpool as the first stage of Art in Motion takes hold of the city’s Commercial District. An exciting partnership between Liverpool Biennial and Liverpool BID Company, Art in Motion sees artists create works which are distributed through city life in collaboration with Arriva, Merseytravel and local businesses. Initially featuring specially commissioned ‘glitch’ based artwork by contemporary artist Gordon Cheung, two further artists will be unveiled later in 2020.
From 20 January 2020, commuters and visitors across Liverpool’s Commercial District can encounter and collect Cheung’s artworks on takeaway coffee cups, on internal graphics and tickets across the Arriva bus network, as well as on posters. The specially printed coffee cups are available at Baby E Coffee & Deli, Bloom & Bean, Bold Street Coffee, Cafe Lucaya, Espresso Café (at Bluecoat), Esquires Coffee, Hemingway’s Café, The Red Berry Club, Rococo Coffee House, Rope & Twines and Thoughtfully Café. A number of other exciting outlets and locations will gradually be unveiled across the city over the course of the project.
For 2020 the overarching theme of Art in Motion centres around the distinctive Liverpool Coat of Arms, which has existed in various formats since the 13th century. Each of the artists will play with ideas that interrogate the diverse history of Liverpool as a city of culture, commerce and exchange.
The first commissioned artist, Gordon Cheung, is a painter whose work explores themes of urban environments, history and speculation. He is known for working with pixel-sorted algorithms to produce ‘glitch’ prints of tulips. For his Art in Motion commission, Cheung is responding to Liverpool’s historic past and dynamic present by creating a series of ‘glitch’ based artworks inspired by the flowers and birds which appear in the city’s Coat of Arms.
With Art in Motion, Liverpool Biennial continues its commitment to producing ground-breaking art in the city’s Commercial District, having commissioned 2019 Turner Prize winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s permanent public artwork Hummingbird Clock in Derby Square for Biennial 2016 as part of Liverpool BID Company’s five-year Public Art Strategy for the Commercial District BID.
Find out more and follow the journey with #LiverpoolAIM.
