On a gloomy Tuesday morning, as you stand on the outskirts of Shoreditch, you notice something that the computer-generated imagery never quite captures. Rising in the middle distance like a diagram of financial ambition is the City of London’s cluster of towers, all polished glass and neat projections, recently mapped in computer-generated imagery by Didier Madoc-Jones for the City of London Corporation. The hyper-saturated portraits wheat-pasted above chicken shops, the peeling murals on shutters, and the visual cacophony of a city that defies neat rendering are all situated between you and those towers. A generation of artists has discreetly taken up residence in that space between the official skyline and the lived one.
Earlier this year, the City of London Corporation unveiled its new skyline computer-generated imagery (CGI) that depicts what the Square Mile will look like once the 500,000 square meters of approved office space are actually constructed. In 2025 alone, planning permission was granted for over ten Gherkin-sized buildings. The pictures are striking and, in a sense, truthful about the financial district’s goals. However, they present a London measured by leasing activity and planning applications. They don’t depict the city as it is experienced and perceived by those who pass through it on a daily basis, and someone else is writing that version.
Born in Bosnia and raised in London, Haris Nukem has been doing just that for more than ten years. His hyper-saturated, dramatically lit, and almost violently physical portraits have moved from Maddox’s gallery walls to the city’s larger visual lexicon. The way his subjects occupy space—tattooed, defiant, and clearly present—has an almost cinematic quality. His work combines documentary intimacy with fashion editorial sensibility, which is a convoluted way of saying that the subjects of his photos appear to fit right in. He once talked about his childhood obsession with comic books and “the idea behind what defines a brand.” It is evident. In addition to feeling storyboarded, his portraits have a strong sense of place in a particular London that the planning renders tend to flatten out.
It’s difficult to ignore how purposefully this generation opposes algorithmic accuracy. These days, social media condenses everything into the same dimensions and light, and AI tools can flood the visual landscape with artificial tidiness. Instead of going back to a more pure past, the artists who are resisting are doing something more intriguing, creating a highly individualized visual language that demands authorship in a situation meant to undermine it. This same impulse—the refusal to appear like a content feed—is reflected in Nadia Lee Cohen’s vibrant, almost theatrical staging and cinematic imagery.
This has a longer history that is worth considering. The world’s most enduring depiction of what a city of power truly looks like—those enormous towers, the workers underground, the masters in the sky—was provided by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which was published nearly a century ago. Both architecture and urban photography are still plagued by the visual grammar that Lang created. However, contemporary artists in London are doing something Lang’s film was unable to do: they are putting themselves at street level in the heart of the city, where the power is immediate and intimate rather than architectural. The skyline is still up for debate. It’s simply being disputed in a different way.
The fact that the new visual code isn’t coming from institutions is what makes this moment feel truly significant, even though it’s still unclear if the larger culture has caught up. Anne Imhof, whose immersive works have spent ten years blurring the lines between performance and fine art and transforming exhibition spaces into something closer to lived experience, is on Artsy’s list of must-see exhibitions for London Gallery Weekend 2026. Institutional recognition of that kind is important. However, what transpires in the city itself, where influence spreads more quickly and leaves fewer traces, may be the more intriguing question.
Planning committees and corporate ambition are shaping London’s official skyline, with each tower representing a wager on where money wants to reside in six years. Something less readable and perhaps more durable is shaping the city’s visual code at eye level. The CGI forecasts will be precise. We’ll paint over the murals. Currently, however, only one of the two cities visible from that corner in Shoreditch needed a planning application.
