The Painter: Renée Levi

For the past few weeks, passersby walking alongside the Thames have seen a striking sight as they reach the Southbank Centre. Two large panels splashed with neon colours cover the concrete façade of the Hayward Gallery, catching the light as it reflects off the brutalist building.

A co-commission by the Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the public installation September is signed by the Basel-based visual artist Renée Levi. “As we went up the building, I was fascinated by this horizontal window,” she says. “I named it ‘the eye’ – so we decided to use it as a centre for the piece and play around.”

Renée Levi, September (2026). Photo: Courtesy of the artist, The Southbank Centre's Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet.

Born in Istanbul and now living in Switzerland, Levi trained as an architect at the HTL Muttenz/Basel before studying visual arts at the Zurich School of Art and Design. Architecture has remained a key element of her artistic language. “This knowledge about material, scale, how I perceive space and architectural details are all part of my experience,” she says.

Once the right location for this new work was found, the process became a period of material experimentation, shaped both by Levi’s vision and by the technical and weather conditions it would face. “We needed a material where the wind goes through and a primer, which I realised acrylic colours I usually worked with didn’t hold onto,” she says.

After many tests, the solution was fluorescent acrylic paints, whose thinner composition adhered better to the mesh. Custom-made tools were developed to let her create brushstrokes across the long canvases.

“She (Levi) has a very pragmatic and practical vision beyond the conceptual and technical aspect of it,” says Audrey Teichmann, art curator at Audemars Piguet. “Renée very much questions what painting is, so it was already something I knew she would explore, but this time with the challenges of the condition and the situation, it was amazing to see the level of research and details to find solutions.”

Renée Levi and curators Audrey Teichmann and Yung Ma at the Hayward Gallery. Photo: courtesy of the artist, The Southbank Centre's Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet.

This doesn’t leave intuition out of the equation. Following the lineage of artists such as Eva Hesse, Miriam Cahn and Lee Krasner, whom she counts among her sources of inspiration, Levi describes her artistic process as fast-paced and emotionally intense. “For me it’s like when you write on the page. I want to fill the space, and so I begin in the left top, and end in the right down. The moment I’m painting I can’t explain. It’s art,” she says.

The resulting piece, September, extends painting onto the gallery’s façade. Its title refers in part to the month in which the installation opened and the seasonal transition it evokes. It gives passersby a reason to pause amid the surrounding grey urban landscape.

“When we were setting it up, a nice old woman passed by, who had no idea Rene was the artist, came up and asked us, ‘Do you know who the artist is?’” remembers Teichmann. “She told me, ‘It made my day, because every day I pass there, and today I have colors in my mind,’ and I think this was extraordinary.”