Art Entr’acte – 2
One of London’s largest sculptures, Slipstream, was unveiled for the reopening of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 2 was unveiled by her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in June 2014. It’s 80 metres long, weighs 77 tonnes, and it was said at the time to be the largest privately funded sculpture in Europe. It represents the movements of a stunt plane captured in time and space in aluminium. Heathrow Airport paid £2.5 million UK for te work, by Richard Wilson, a sculpture artist born in London in 1953. His work can be seen also on Greenwich Peninsula, where his Slice of Reality installation is quite simply a slice of a ship. The Saatchi Gallery has 20.50, which is a huge tank of oil.
Interestingly, some of the sketches before he did Slipstream are in Suite 419. The Clemente suite at Brown’s Hotel – see below. They’re lovely, and they fit so well with the deep sage wallpaper and fittings that are so typically Olga Polizzi, design director and sister of Sir Rocco Forte. She loves mixing old and new, and it’s another example of great art there at the hotel. Thank you, Sarah Kundi, the hotel manager, for finding details of the sketches – go and see them, so well, well worth it.
As we know, Brown’s Hotel is always a gallery of the arts. There are historic black and white photos, all by Donovan, in the elevators and his eponymous bar. All bedrooms have heavy books, including, invariably, the authoritative William Shawcross tome on Her Late Majesty. And a few other biographies and books that you really want to read at any time. And bringing creativity to this very day, there’s probably going to be, outside elevators, a little homily handwritten by the hotel’s biggest boss, Richard Cooke, even though he is invariably somewhere else in the world.
