LONDON.- Today, the V&A unveils London-based artist Thomas J Price’s monumental new sculpture, A Place Beyond, outside V&A East Museum, on East Bank in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, ahead of the museum’s public opening on 18 April 2026.

At 18ft, A Place Beyond, is Price’s tallest sculpture to-date. Welcoming visitors into V&A East Museum, the sculpture depicts a fictionalised young person in casual dress, mobile phone in-hand, looking out to a horizon full of possibilities.

A Place Beyond is created from an amalgamation of images, 3D scans and observations. Constructed in bronze, using digital technology and ancient techniques, Price continues to critique narratives within classical sculpture.

The title, A Place Beyond encourages viewers to bring their own thoughts, feelings and lived experiences to the work. The sculpture acts as a quiet emblem for change and a rejection of social or racial profiling to instead create connection through everyday moments. The V&A East Youth Collective were consulted during the process to help create an important new public artwork for east London, celebrating the diversity of the area.

Gus Casely-Hayford, V&A East Director, said: “V&A East Museum is for everyone – I want you to feel that this space is for you. I’ve long admired Thomas J Price’s work as an east London based artist working on an international scale. His sculptures have such presence and are meticulously crafted, yet their power lies in their perceived ordinariness, and the relationships they build with their surroundings and the communities they share space with. At V&A East Museum, we celebrate creativity for a changing world. Thomas’s A Place Beyond symbolises those historically excluded from public monuments, challenging our preconceptions about representation, perception and identity. I can’t think of a more powerful work to greet our visitors on their way into V&A East Museum.”

Thomas J Price, said: “Being based in east London, it means so much to have my public work, A Place Beyond, on display at V&A East Museum. I want this sculpture to become an extension of the people who inhabit the museum, and the spaces around it. 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. I’m excited to be part of the next chapter in the V&A’s evolution in east London.”

Designed by architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, V&A East Museum, opens on 18 April on East Bank in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Co-created with young people, creatives, and those living, working and studying in east London, it celebrates making and creativity for a changing world. V&A East Museum includes two permanent Why We Make galleries offering a new, topical lens on the V&A’s global collections, alongside major temporary exhibitions, New Work creative commissions and live events spotlighting the people, ideas and creativity shaping global culture right now. It also includes a café by Jikoni, an exciting partnership with the restaurant group known for ‘cooking across borders’.

New Work commissions

Also announced today is New Work – V&A East’s new six-monthly rotating creative commissions programme, championing a range of local and global artists, designers and community collaborators who are shaping contemporary culture today. Responding to a central and changing theme, the commissions will explore new ideas and pathways for creativity and address the urgent social, cultural, and political issues of our time. The creative commissions will be displayed across V&A East’s two sites – V&A East Museum and Storehouse from 18 April 2026.

New Work’s inaugural theme, Making East London invites artists Tania Bruguera, Es Devlin, Lawrence Lek, Rene Matić, Shahed Saleem, Justinien Tribillon, Carrie Mae Weems, and Laura Wilson to reflect on east London’s layered histories and creative futures. Their works explore east London as a site of global influence, recovery, cross cultural exchange and creative production – drawing on its people, histories, materials, ecosystems, and beyond, to bring new perspectives on the areas surrounding V&A East Museum and Storehouse.

Madeleine Haddon, Senior Curator, V&A East, said: “We’re delighted to introduce New Work – a new series of creative commissions across both V&A East Museum and Storehouse – that will change every six months. Our first theme, ‘Making East London’ sees artists from Tania Bruguera to Es Devlin, Lawrence Lek, Rene Matić and Carrie Mae Weems explore both the foundations and the future of making in east London. Installed throughout our galleries, circulation spaces and public areas, the commissions transform our V&A East sites into spaces of making, exchange, and experimentation, illuminating the V&A’s collections and activating the architecture of our buildings in new and unexpected ways.”

New Work at V&A East Museum:

• Carrie Mae Weems’ The Long Goodbye marks the first time that the artist has turned her lens to the UK in a brand-new video on display in the Museum’s Why We Make galleries’ Film Room. Weems’s work connects the histories of immigration in east London to wider currents of transatlantic exchange foregrounding the creative power of immigrant communities across the globe.

• Turner-prize nominated photographer and artist Rene Matić responds to the inaugural theme, and V&A East Museum’s first exhibition, The Music is Black: A British Story, with Heard. Here, Matić transforms their photographic works into a sound system of lightboxes, celebrating events such as Notting Hill Carnival and the vibrant nightlife of East London and Britain today and reflecting on the powerful role Black British music plays in shaping communities, as people gather, remember, and move together.

• Towards A Civic Museum is a stained-glass piece by artist Tania Bruguera which has been collaboratively created between the artist and the V&A East Youth Collective, outlining V&A East’s steadfast commitment to the principles and aspirations of its young audiences.

• Heads! Look to the Workers is a series of moving sculpture by artist Laura Wilson honouring the makers and workers of east London past and present, drawing on her research into east London’s theatres, factories and women’s workwear to foreground histories of labour often left unseen.

• On the Sly is a film by artist Justinien Tribillon revealing the quiet ingenuity of east London workers using the materials and machinery of their workplace to create something ‘on the sly’ for themselves to take home –acts of making that blur the line between labour, creativity, and resistance.

New Work at V&A East Storehouse:

• Artist Es Devlin’s installation The Everythingists animates Natalia Goncharova’s monumental 1924 stage cloth for Igor Stravkinsy’s The Firebird (on display at V&A East Storehouse for the first time in over a decade), putting the movements of an east London dancer Joshua Shanny-Wynter and history of east London architecture in dialogue with the myth of The Firebird through drawing, sculpture and sound.

• Guanyin II: The Caretaker by artist Lawrence Lek is an immersive video game set in a speculative future of V&A East Storehouse. It invites players to enter staff-only areas of Storehouse such as the conservations studios as they confront questions about the relationship between historic objects, technology and the preservation of east London’s past, present, and imagined futures.

• In I Was Born Here, artist Shahed Saleem presents three mosaic tapestries exploring stories of east London’s migration and labour industries. The work responds to the 15th-century Torrijos Ceiling on view at V&A East Storehouse and draws parallels between intertwined histories of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in 15th-century Spain and the contemporary anti-immigration rhetoric and politics in the UK.

Announced today – Dispersal: Picturing Urban Change in East London

East London has always been a place of making and creativity. Curated by V&A East Chief Curator, Brendan Cormier, this new display brings together 46 photographs by Marion Davies and Debra Rapp, who documented the people and workplaces of east London-based labour businesses at threat of closure or relocation due to the development of the London 2012 Olympic Games. From belt-making to zinc galvanising, salmon smoking, stained glass and stage design workshops, the images are a potent reminder of the industrial and working-class history of east London. The display reflects on the changing landscape surrounding V&A East Museum – and the museum’s place in creativity and supporting the creative industries.