Swiss artist Renée Levi has transformed the exterior of Hayward Gallery with September, a new two-panel painting bringing sweeping gestures of colour across the building’s iconic grey concrete facade.
Launching today, September is Levi’s first large-scale public installation in the UK and has been co-commissioned by Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet Contemporary.
Rather than treating the gallery’s Brutalist architecture simply as somewhere to hang the work, Levi has used the building itself as her starting point. Painted on industrial mesh, the two panels respond to the Hayward’s concrete textures, windows and architectural protrusions, introducing bold, gestural colour across its South Bank exterior.
The installation is designed to be encountered in much the same way as the building itself: while walking past it.
“The work can never be seen all at once,”
Levi explains.
“It is encountered in passing, from different distances and viewpoints, and perhaps something different is noticed each time.”
That changing relationship between painting, architecture and the body is central to Levi’s practice. Trained as an architect, she has long pushed painting beyond the conventional canvas, from wall paintings to large-scale interventions that respond directly to their surroundings.
For September, the movement of people through the South Bank becomes another element of the work. Levi sees the painting unfolding first through the physical process of making it and then through repeated encounters as people pass the gallery during its eight-week installation.
Its title picks up on that sense of impermanence, referencing a moment when weather, light and the pace of city life are beginning to change.
“For a limited time, September changes the appearance of the Hayward Gallery,”
Levi says.
“And when the work disappears again, those who have passed it before may notice that something is missing.”
The commission continues a history of artists using Hayward Gallery’s distinctive exterior as a canvas in its own right. Previous interventions have included Bharti Kher’s supersized bindis, while the wider Southbank Centre site has hosted public art projects ranging from Quentin Blake illustrations to annual installation trails.
“Over the years, the Hayward Gallery’s raw concrete exterior has served as an unconventional canvas for artistic intervention,”
says Yung Ma, Senior Curator at Hayward Gallery.
“Renée Levi extends our longstanding public art offering with September, a large-scale painting with sweeping gestures that disrupt the grey Brutalist facade and reflect the constant motion of the South Bank itself.”
The project is also a first for its co-commissioner: September is the first painting commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, which has worked with international artists on new commissions since 2012.
For the next eight weeks, however, its most immediate impact is considerably simpler: one of London’s best-known Brutalist buildings has suddenly acquired a substantial splash of colour.
Renée Levi: September, On view for eight weeks.
Free and visible from the South Bank. Hayward Gallery
About the artist
For over thirty years Renée Levi has questioned the medium of painting. She investigates colour, the application of paint, its materiality and relationship to space on various image carriers as well as installations. Levi was born in 1960, in Istanbul and grew up in Aargau. Today, she lives and works in Basel. After studying architecture at the HTL Muttenz/Basel, she studied at the Zurich School of Art and Design. In 1998, she started working together with Marcel Schmid as a studio partner.
Levi’s major projects include Mira for the courtyard gallery of Kunstmuseum Basel (2025); LA ELLE, an installation for the entrance hall of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024); and Mia, transforming a floor of Le Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon for the Lyon Biennale (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include at Öktem Aykut (Istanbul, 2025 & 2022); Galerie Mezzanin (Geneva, 2024); PHILIPPZOLLINGER (Zurich, 2023 & 2021); Villa du Parc (Annemasse, 2021); Musée d’Art, Histoire et Archéologie d’Évreux (2020); Biennale de Lyon (2019); Museum Langmatt (Baden, 2019); Istituto Svizzero Milan (2019) and at Galerie Freymond-Guth (Basel, 2017). In addition, the artist has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2023); Centre d’art Pasquart (Biel, 2022); MAMCO (Geneva, 2021); Istituto Svizzero Rome (2019); and at Kunstverein Munich (2015).
From 2001 to 2022, Levi was Professor of Painting at the Institute of Art at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW, joining Chus Martínez’s MA programme in 2014. Renée Levi has received several awards, including the Prix de la Société des Arts de Genève, Arts Visuels, in 2019 and the Prix Meret Oppenheim in 2002. In 2023, Levi was the winner of a public art competition for the Swiss Parliament Building in Bern, Switzerland.
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