London’s Hayward Gallery has worn its Brutalist concrete unadorned since 1968. This autumn it wears paint. “September,” a monumental two-panel painting by Swiss artist Renée Levi, has taken over the gallery’s façade — the inaugural commission of Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the watchmaker’s dedicated art programme, and Levi’s first large-scale public work in the United Kingdom.
Levi’s intervention treats the building’s most recognisable feature — the protruding rectangular window known as its “eye” — as the composition’s focal point, with bright, gestural mark-making sweeping outward across the concrete. The effect is a collision of registers: fluorescent, joyful, fast-moving colour over the most severe architecture in London, on view from 24 September through 15 November.
“The painting unfolds over time — first through the act of painting, and later through the movement of people passing by,” Levi says of the work. “For a limited time, ‘September’ changes the appearance of the Hayward Gallery.” Audrey Teichmann, who curates the programme, frames the commission as an expression of values shared between artist and manufacture: excellence, experimentation and innovation “through material, process and time.”
For Le Brassus, this is a statement of intent. Audemars Piguet has supported artists for years — Gulf audiences will remember its long presence at Art Dubai — but Audemars Piguet Contemporary formalises that patronage into a commissioning body of its own, beginning at civic scale rather than fair-booth scale. It follows a season in which watchmaking’s engagement with contemporary art has sharpened noticeably, from Hublot’s Jeff Koons collaboration to LVMH’s growing cultural programme; the difference here is that there is no watch attached, no limited edition to queue for. Just a building repainted with time in mind, by a maison that measures it for a living — and eight weeks to see it before the concrete returns to grey.
