From a hand-cut stencil to monumental bronze and a new generation of hand-finished artworks.
Discover how Lhouette’s iconic Angel Cake motif is entering a new chapter, from a monumental bronze commission to a growing series of sculptural works and hand-stencilled editions. The latest pieces bring together the evolution of his practice with a return to the raw materials, layered surfaces and handmade processes that helped define his early work.
For more than 15 years, one unmistakable silhouette has followed Lhouette through almost every stage of his artistic practice.
Angel Cake began as a simple spray-painted stencil, created during the formative years of a practice built around experimentation, found materials, popular culture and a deliberately DIY approach. Since then, she has appeared across paintings, limited editions, wall reliefs, installations and mixed-media originals, becoming one of the most recognisable symbols associated with the British contemporary artist.
As Lhouette puts it, Angel Cake has become “something of an icon itself”, a recurring image through which he can explore repetition, symbolism and the changing language of his work.
For collectors interested in how that journey began, explore the story of Angel Cake and Lhouette’s artistic evolution here.
Now, that journey has entered perhaps its most ambitious chapter yet.
How did Angel Cake become a monumental bronze sculpture?
The catalyst was an extraordinary private commission.
Created in collaboration with specialist British fine-art foundry Pangolin Editions, Lhouette transformed Angel Cake into a monumental, double-sided bronze sculpture weighing approximately 500kg. The finished figure stands almost two metres tall and is positioned upon a bronze-cast oil drum, itself covered with the artist’s visual language of symbols, lettering and cultural references.
Titled A Fall from Grace, the sculpture represents a significant departure in scale and material, but its origins remain firmly rooted in Lhouette’s studio practice. Before bronze entered the equation, the full-size original was constructed by hand using layers of cut and applied stencil work. Those textures were then preserved through mould-making and casting, retaining details including paper splits, engraved recesses and the imperfections of the original model.
That contrast is fundamental to the work.
Angel Cake began with spray paint, masking tape and card. She now exists in a material traditionally associated with monuments and permanence. Lhouette describes that transformation as taking something born from his early “garage artistry” and giving it “weight, history and permanence”.
The accompanying oil drum pushes the idea further. An object associated with industry and mass production has been recreated through the highly skilled, labour-intensive tradition of bronze casting. Lhouette deliberately plays one world against another: disposable against permanent, urban against monumental, contemporary Pop imagery against an ancient sculptural process.
Visually, the bronze is considerably more complex than Angel Cake’s original silhouette. Sacred geometry sits beside consumer imagery, digital references, skeletons, fragments of language and symbols concerned with life and mortality. The studio describes the resulting figure as both a possible guardian and a “fall from grace”, giving the familiar character a more ambiguous identity.
The scale of the undertaking is equally significant. The completed private commission involved model-making, mould-making, casting, metal fabrication, chasing, patination, polishing, groundwork and installation.
But perhaps the most important outcome was what happened next.
"There’s a kinda cool contradiction in seeing that same silhouette now cast in a museum grade bronze, taking something that started with a can of spray paint, masking tape and card over a decade ago and giving it this weight, history and permanence. For me it’s a reflection of how far you can push a simple idea if you keep coming back to it and allowing it to evolve."
- Lhouette
How is the bronze shaping a new generation of Angel Cake sculptures?
The monumental bronze commission has opened up a new sculptural direction for Angel Cake, allowing Lhouette to take the form developed for the original work and reinterpret it at more collectible scales. The studio is now able to create bespoke Angel Cake sculptures tailored to individual collectors, with flexibility across scale, finish and presentation, including versions with or without the base.
A wide range of finishes can be explored, from the more industrial and aged character of Aged Iron, Oxidised Bronze, Naked Stone and Matte Black, through to the reflective surfaces of Chrome Steel, Hot Pink Chrome and Semi-Polished Bronze. For something more vivid, Campbells Red Gloss and Sky Blue Metallic Gloss bring a bold Pop Art energy to the silhouette.
This ability to alter the surface, colour and presentation makes each version feel closely connected to Lhouette’s wider practice, while giving collectors the opportunity to commission an Angel Cake sculpture that works specifically for their collection or interior.
For further information on available sizes, finishes, configurations and bespoke commissions, contact Wyecliffe Galleries to discuss creating your own Angel Cake sculpture.
Why do the new stencil editions look back as well as forward?
Alongside this move further into sculpture, another new body of Angel Cake work travels deliberately in the opposite direction. Lhouette is returning to the stencil.
The new editions are individually hand-stencilled rather than simply reproducing the image mechanically, bringing the physical act of making back to the foreground. Even their presentation becomes part of the work, with specially created wooden packaging conceived as an artistic object rather than disposable protection.
That choice has an important connection to Lhouette’s earlier practice.
Before the polished surfaces and increasingly ambitious fabrication of recent years, raw wood, reclaimed pallets, industrial materials and handmade construction formed an important part of his visual identity. The new works revisit that rougher vocabulary while benefiting from everything Angel Cake has become in the years since.
It creates an interesting counterpoint to the bronze. One direction takes a stencil and translates it into hundreds of kilograms of permanent cast metal. The other strips the process back towards paint, wood, repetition and the immediacy of the artist’s hand.
That tension feels particularly characteristic of Lhouette. His wider practice repeatedly brings opposing ideas together, from luxury and decay to innocence and rebellion, nostalgia and contemporary culture.
The newest Angel Cake works do something similar. They look forward into sculpture while simultaneously returning to the raw visual language from which the character originally emerged.
An icon still in progress
There is a temptation to describe Angel Cake as an established Lhouette icon, but perhaps the more interesting point is that the image has never really been finished. The silhouette has survived precisely because Lhouette continues to test what else it can become.
What began with spray paint and card has travelled through collage, mixed media, wall-mounted reliefs and international exhibitions before becoming a monumental bronze. That sculpture is now providing the blueprint for a new generation of three-dimensional work, while the latest stencil editions reconnect the character with the tactile, handmade roots of Lhouette’s earliest practice.
More than 15 years after her creation, Angel Cake remains recognisable. The materials, scale and possibilities around her are changing considerably.
Lhouette’s is one of constant reinvention, where familiar icons are reworked through new materials, processes and ideas.