Painter Renée Levi will unveil a new large-scale work on the façade of London’s Hayward Gallery this fall. The two-panel painting has been co-commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the watch brand’s dedicated art programme. The installation will mark the programme’s first painting commission and is Levi’s first large-scale commission in the U.K. It will be on view from September 23rd through November 15th.
“Drawing is an immediate, bodily act in situ within a site that determines material, scale, and action,” said the artist in a press statement. “Scale is body-based: reach, arm movement, spatial extension. Tools emerge from the situation and define mark-making. Rules arise within the act and exclude correction, overpainting, and composition. There is no return. The work is made in a single continuous passage. Drawing is action. Action produces the image. What becomes visible is time.”
Untitled, 2004
Renée Levi
Galerie Knoell, Basel
stanbul-born and Berlin-based, Levi’s practice spans painting, drawing, installation, and site-specific interventions. Her work investigates the immediacy of paint application, using bold colors and large gestures that are applied with aerosol or cleaning rags. Her installations examine painting as a practice that at once conceals, reveals, filters, and reshapes the surface on which it is applied. The resulting image is not one that is predetermined, but rather one that unfolds through exploration. Last year, the artist mounted "LA ELLE," at the Palais de Tokyo, an installation featuring mural paintings and window drawings.
Her site-responsive work for the Hayward façade takes cues from the gallery’s Brutalist architecture, taking its characteristic protrusions and windows as a starting point. It will be realized using an industrial mesh support to adapt to the outdoor environment.
“Activating the Hayward Gallery’s iconic architecture, Renée Levi’s new work expands the possibilities of painting,” shared Audemars Piguet Contemporary curator Audrey Teichmann in a press statement. “Levi approaches the Hayward Gallery not as a backdrop, but as a surface to engage, responding to its rhythm, materiality, and scale.”
