London’s Underground reimagined as sound and paint at Guildhall Art Gallery

Huge paintings of Tube stations and cityscapes, accompanied by the layered creaks, groans and metallic rhythms of London’s railway network, will immerse visitors in a new exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery. Opening on 27th February, the Jock McFadyen Underground exhibition revisits a celebrated body of work from the late 1990s and reframes it through an ambitious collaboration with musician and composer Jem Finer.

Titled Jock McFadyen with Jem Finer: Underground (and Surface), the show brings together the Paisley-born painter and Royal Academician Jock McFadyen with Finer, best known as a founding member of The Pogues. The result is an immersive meeting of image and sound, where familiar urban spaces hover between recognition and abstraction.

Paintings that dissolve the familiar city

McFadyen’s Underground paintings, first conceived more than two decades ago, explore the psychological space of the Tube. Works such as Bank and Ghost take recognisable signage and architecture and allow them to dissolve, creating a subtle unease between orientation and disorientation. These darker subterranean scenes are offset by expansive city views above ground. In paintings such as Popular Enclosure, London opens out beneath radiant blue skies, calm and distant from the claustrophobia below.

Each painting is linked site-specifically to a particular Tube station, grounding the work in lived experience even as it drifts towards abstraction. The city feels at once intimate and monumental, observed from within rather than from afar.

The Underground as a living organism

What is new, and central to this exhibition, is sound. Finer’s field recordings from the Northern and Central lines run through the gallery, transforming the paintings into what he describes as something closer to “living, breathing organisms”. The recordings are mechanical yet melodic, made up of familiar but hard-to-place noises: rails grinding, doors closing, distant pips and groans that usually pass unnoticed by commuters.

The collaboration was co-curated by Elizabeth Scott, and carefully balances visual and auditory elements so that neither dominates the other.

Brendan Barns, Chairman of the City of London Corporation’s Culture, Heritage and Libraries Committee, said the combination was especially compelling. “Jock McFadyen’s consummate skill in presenting epic views of the capital which, at the same time, convey a sense of intimacy, as well as beauty and decay, are sure to engage and impress visitors. Adding Jem Finer’s atmospheric soundscapes from the Tube network to the mix is particularly intriguing, and it will undoubtedly make for a very memorable experience.”

Listening differently to the city

For McFadyen, the collaboration deepens a long-standing interest in the overlooked details of urban life. “Many of us descend daily into the tunnels and carriages that offer rapid access to distant parts of our urban world,” he said. “We see and hear a remarkable variety of things there, but how often do we pay attention to the graffiti-daubed exteriors, the rails, pipes, struts and wires that adorn the surface of the spaces through which we pass?”

He added that Finer’s contribution far exceeded his original intentions. “I’m honoured that Jem has contributed such a beautiful soundtrack to my Underground series. It is a wonderful haunting piece, which seems to unfold with new sounds every time I hear it.”

Finer, meanwhile, described his approach as closely aligned with McFadyen’s thinking about paint. “For me, the form is important, but the sound is the true subject,” he said. “I worked with the recordings in the way Jock might work with paint, transformed just far enough that there remains a trace of familiarity while becoming something unexpected.”

Access and context

As with several recent exhibitions, the gallery will operate a ‘Pay What You Can’ admission model, continuing an effort to widen access to the City’s cultural spaces. The exhibition also sits within the City of London Corporation’s wider cultural strategy, Destination City, which aims to encourage people to live, work and spend time in the Square Mile.

For more thoughtful coverage of the Square Mile’s exhibitions, galleries and cultural life, follow EyeOnLondon City and explore our arts and culture section for weekly updates and informed reviews.

[Image Credit | Jock McFadyen via City of London Corporation]

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