September

The Hayward Gallery wouldn't have been easy to hide.

The building opened on London’s South Bank in 1968 as part of the concrete complex that includes Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room. Its galleries, exterior terraces, stairways, protruding volumes and exposed concrete made it one of Britain’s defining Brutalist cultural buildings. Even before someone puts work inside it, the architecture is already showing itself off.

Renée Levi put a painting on the outside.

September, on view through November 15, is a two-panel work covering part of the Hayward’s facade with broad, bright gestures painted onto industrial mesh. The concrete, windows and irregular geometry of the building remain visible beneath and around it.

That relationship was built into the commission.

The Hayward developed the project with Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the art program established by the Swiss watchmaker in 2012. Unlike a conventional sponsorship program, Audemars Piguet Contemporary commissions artists to make new work, with its in-house curators involved from development through exhibition. The works remain with the artists and become part of their practices.

Its curatorial team had followed Levi’s work for several years before approaching this commission. For Audemars Piguet Contemporary, September is also the first painting the program has commissioned.

Levi makes unusual sense for the building.

Born in Istanbul in 1960 and raised in Switzerland, she originally trained as an architect before studying art and design in Zurich. For more than thirty years, her painting has moved between conventional supports, walls and architectural space. She tends to describe painting less as the production of a fixed image than as a physical encounter among the body, material and site.

At the Hayward, that required developing another way to paint.

The work was produced on industrial mesh, not a solid panel. Levi’s team prepared it in modular sections before assembling them on the building. The material created an unusual technical problem: color had to operate across a surface that remained partly transparent, so the preparation had to account for paint, mesh, concrete, windows and whatever would remain visible behind the image.

The mesh solves an aesthetic problem at the same time.

A conventional opaque canvas could have treated the Hayward as a wall to be hidden. Levi’s painting lets the building remain present.

The gallery’s windows interrupt it. Concrete appears through it. Protrusions and changes in the facade alter its shape. From the South Bank, the work changes with distance, weather and light. The Hayward describes September as a response to the changing weather, light and pace of London at this time of year.

A watchmaker’s art program commissions a painter trained as an architect to work on a gallery whose architecture refuses to become a neutral background. The painting will exist on the building for eight weeks and then disappear.