Czech House presents the David Cerny London Booster sculpture consisting of a double-decker London bus manufactured in 1957, which Cerny has fitted with enormous mechanical arms allowing it to do press-ups.
David Cerny London Booster
The work has been created to coincide with London hosting the Olympics and will be on display outside the Business Design Centre in Islington, which will be transformed into the Czech House, opened to general public and offering cultural, sporting and social entertainment for the duration of the games. The Czech House officially opens on 27 July at 10 am.
Cerny has been responsible for some of the most controversial public sculpture of our time and first came to wider public attention with his Monument to Soviet Tank Crews (1991). In an act of guerrilla art, he painted a Soviet Tank war memorial pink. He has since completed other politically charged works such as Shark (2005) and Entropa (2008). The former is based on Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), but instead of a shark uses a bound figure of Saddam Hussein suspended in formaldehyde; the latter caused both outrage and admiration at its installation in the European Council.
Other widely recognised works include Babies on the Tower (2001) in Prague and Metalmorphosis (2007) in North Carolina. Such projects have led to his work being featured in publications including the Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian and The New York Times. Over the last twenty years Cerny’s works have continued to grow in ambition and scale, and London Booster is no exception.
The bus will move up and down to varying heights and angles of elevation and will provide additional video and audio content through the windows which are made from a continuous television screen. The complex engineering required to build this monumental moving piece has taken six months of planning and construction.
London Booster will be on display from the 24th July 2012 in conjunction with Czech House and its 17 days of sport, culture and entertainment at the Business Design Centre. Czech House is run by the Czech Olympic Committee with the support of many institutional and business partners from the Czech Republic. – www.czechhouselondon.cz