London: It’s all change at Sketch

The power of colour – something demonstrated in the past by The Gallery, architect and designer India Mahdavi's restaurant/manifesto of 2014, where the predominant colour was a Hollywood-style millennial pink. The tone made a striking contrast with the irreverent black and white drawings by the British artist David Shrigley on the walls. Today though the trenchant monochrome purity has gone, replaced on the pink backdrop by around a hundred new polychrome works by Shrigley. 

The artist calls the new body of work “a series of new colourful works. With dreary news often filling our headlines, I hope that diners will enjoy my take on the banality of everyday life.” It is a change that has completely altered the atmosphere of the restaurant, the beating heart of the celebrated Sketch in London's Conduit Street – to the point that Mahdavi herself wanted to remodel the space to create a better setting for Shrigley's new works. “For me, pink is more than a colour, it’s a mood,” the designer says. “Pink has become my flag – a way to express strength and fragility in one colour and in one space. Both have become iconic.”