Val Lee @ Hayward Gallery, London - 'The Presence of Solitude' Exhibition

Val Lee

The Presence of Solitude

Hayward Gallery, London

Through 11 January 2026

Val Lee 

Buenos días mujeres (2019) 

Photo by Yollotl Alvarado, courtesy the artist 

Val Lee 

Charting the Contours of Time (2023) 

Photo by Takuya Matsumi, courtesy the artist 

The Hayward Gallery, in partnership with the RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.) [*], presents Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude. This is the first solo exhibition in the UK by Taiwanese artist Val Lee and the fourth exhibition in the RC Foundation Project Space Exhibition Series, which showcases the next generation of emerging international artists.

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude takes place in the HENI Project Space in the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery – a space that offers the opportunity for audiences to see exhibitions from emerging international artists for free.

Val Lee

The Landless Events (2022)

Photo by Chen Etang, courtesy the artist

Val Lee

The Landless Events (2022)

Photo by Chen Etang, courtesy the artist

Bringing together film, photography and costume, the exhibition highlights Lee’s longstanding exploration of isolation and solitude. By creating disjointed and ambiguous narratives with unidentifiable figures, her work makes viewers feel as though time and meaning have been displaced. This feeling of alienation encourages us to think about how our personal experiences and collective memories are shaped by state and political systems.

The exhibition features new iterations of two existing works: Valley in the Minibus (2024) and The Sorrowful Football Team (2025). Valley in the Minibus explores the concept of ‘non-places’, defined by French anthropologist Marc Augé as transitory spaces that people pass through (such as airports, motorways, shopping centres) and become anonymous. Building on the original work and live event that took place over several weekends, a group of strangers travel through a winding landscape in a van with a creature-like masked and costumed figure. A new video commission introduces the same masked figure DJing completely alone in an anonymous space. Three full body, long haired costumes and veiled masks used in the work are on display as part of the installation. Present but disconnected from the audience, the presentation highlights the artist's interest in creating connections and intimacies through isolated experiences.

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist 

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist 

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist 

Reimagined for the exhibition as a slide projection, The Sorrowful Football Team (2025) depicts a blind football team playing a match in the snow in Northern Japan. Blind football is an organised sport designed for players who are blind or visually impaired. Here, Lee utilises it as a metaphor to reflect on the impact of political repression experienced under the White Terror rule in Taiwan between 1947-1987 as well as the possibility of finding light in solitary darkness.

Val Lee

The Sorrowful Football Team (2025) 

Courtesy the artist 

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025) 

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist 

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025) 

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist 

Val Lee

The Sorrowful Football Team (2025) 

Courtesy the artist 

Yung Ma, Senior Curator of the Hayward Gallery, says: “Straddling visual and live art, Val Lee has embraced different principles to forge an artistic language that invokes various experiences, past and present. While the exhibition explores the deeply felt presence of solitude in her recent works, it is ultimately a hopeful gesture about finding connections in the most unexpected places.”

Val Lee says: "Presenting this work at Hayward Gallery allows me to further explore ambiguous fields—where collectivity is not given, but quietly rehearsed in the blank spaces of perception. I’m glad to share this piece in London at Hayward Gallery - where form, time, and relation can stay in flux."

Previous artists who have exhibited in the HENI Project Space include Huang Po-Chih, Heecheon Kim, Amol K Patil, Thabiso Sekgala and Hicham Berrada. The exhibition marks the fourth iteration of The RC Foundation Project Space Exhibition Series and makes up an important part of the Southbank Centre’s vast array of free programming for all to enjoy.

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude is curated by Hayward Gallery Senior Curator, Yung Ma, and Curatorial Assistant, Felix Choong. Additional support provided by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (R.O.C.).

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude is presented alongside Gilbert & George 21ST CENTURY PICTURES at the Hayward Gallery, as well as Teresa Solar Abboud’s Mother Tongue: a monumental new public art commission, outside the gallery.

Artist Val Lee

Val Lee (b. 1981, Taipei) is a director and visual artist working across expanded cinema, performance, and moving image. Trained in Filmmaking and Sociology at SUNY, Lee founded the art collective Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel in 2008. Their work constructs temporal scenarios that reframe space, spectatorship, and perception, often exploring systemic violence, war, and affective states through nonlinear, disorienting environments. Lee’s works have been shown internationally including the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Grand Palais, HKW Berlin, MEP, MOCA Taipei, and others, with performances at TFAM, Kyoto Art Center, and the Taiwan National Theater. Honours include the Taishin Arts Award in 2017 and support from the Asian Cultural Council and C-LAB.

RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.)

Founded in 1995 by Rong Chuan Chen, RC Foundation has been a visionary force in promoting Taiwanese contemporary art on the global stage. An active champion in fostering cultural and artistic exchanges, RC Foundation has been supporting artists, curators and independent art spaces from Taiwan through grants and partnerships, both locally and internationally. These long-term relationships have nurtured and enriched numerous artistic projects from different perspectives, generating invaluable connections between Taiwan's contemporary art practitioners and their global counterparts.

HAYWARD GALLERY

Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude

Hayward Gallery, London, 7 October 2025 - 11 January 2026

Yoshitomo Nara @ Hayward Gallery, London - Retrospective Exhibition

Yoshitomo Nara

Hayward Gallery, London

10 June - 31 August 2025

Portrait of Yoshitomo Nara 

© the artist and the Yoshitomo Nara Foundation

Photo: Ryoichi Kawajiri 

Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara 

Harmless Kitty, 1994

Photo: Mark Blower 

Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara

Missing in Action, 1999 

Photo: Mark Blower 

Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara

Miss Margaret, 2016 

Photo: Mark Blower 

Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

The Hayward Gallery presents the first UK solo exhibition at a public art gallery by leading Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. The major retrospective invites viewers to immerse themselves in the intriguing world of one of today’s most celebrated artists through four decades of work, including recent paintings and drawings, as well as sculptures and iconic portraits brought to life through richly layered colours. Expanding on the blockbuster exhibition from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Yoshitomo Nara offers a window into the inner-workings of the artist, providing an insight into how Nara’s life experiences are intrinsically linked to his output through core themes and motifs.

Yoshitomo Nara is best-known for his striking images of child-like figures and animals with large heads and wide eyes that challenge viewers with their direct gaze and defiant stance. Both captivating and ominous, these characters exemplify Nara’s distinctive style that is recognised across the world. Although primarily a painter, he also works with a variety of materials across collage, sculpture, drawing, and installation to explore ideas of home, isolation, nature, peace, resistance and freedom.

Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara 

at the Hayward Gallery 

Photo: Mark Blower

Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara 

at the Hayward Gallery 

Photo: Mark Blower

Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara 

at the Hayward Gallery 

Photo: Mark Blower

Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara 

at the Hayward Gallery 

Photo: Mark Blower

Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara 

at the Hayward Gallery 

Photo: Mark Blower

Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara 

at the Hayward Gallery 

Photo: Mark Blower

Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Organised thematically, the exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of Yoshitomo Nara’s artistic evolution, illuminating his deep interest in humanity with works inspired by the people, emotions and places that he has encountered throughout his life.

Nara’s formative years in Japan’s northern Tōhoku region were spent drawing and listening to the Far East Network (FEN): the radio station for American troops stationed in Japan during the Vietnam War. Throughout the retrospective, viewers can see how Nara’s art often draws from his lifelong love of music, ranging from the antiwar folksongs by American singer-songwriters heard on FEN, to the melancholy sounds of the blues and, more recently, punk and new wave.

Studying and living in Germany also proved crucial in establishing Nara’s style. Upon visiting Germany in 1980, he discovered the masters of European modernism, the early Middle Ages and the Renaissance which influenced his later works. Enrolling at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Yoshitomo Nara was unable to speak German and used his art to express himself, utilising techniques learnt from Neo-Expressionist artist A. R. Penck. Nara’s big-eyed characters were created in this period, with early works like Ships in Girl (1992) countering the popular Japanese kawaii (cute) style through their mysterious expressions and rebellious demeanour.

Yoshitomo Nara

Under the Tree, 2006 

Acrylic and colored pencil on corrugated board, 

30.5 x 23.8 cm

Courtesy of the artist

Yoshitomo Nara

Fire, 2009 

Acrylic on wood, 90 x 90cm

Courtesy of the artist and Yuichi Kawasaki Collection

Yoshitomo Nara 

Power in a Union, 2024

Acrylic on wood, 104.5 x 90.7 x 6 (1.2) cm

Courtesy the artist

Yoshitomo Nara 

Banging the Drum, 2020

Acrylic and colored pencil on corrugated board, 

186 x 121.5 cm

Courtesy the artist and private collection

The exhibition highlights the political and societal discourse within Nara’s work, with disasters such as the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi power plant failure fueling his artistic response to the widespread feelings of loss and pain caused by these events. Works like From the Bomb Shelter (2017), which shows a child tentatively emerging from an underground bunker, reflect his changed viewpoint of the world. Meanwhile, recent paintings such as Midnight Tears (2023) emanate uncertainty through the ethereal, fragmented touches of colour and tear-filled eyes of the child it depicts.

Yung Ma, Senior Curator of the Hayward Gallery, says: “We have the tendency to overuse the word ‘iconic’ but in the case of Yoshitomo Nara, I can hardly think of a more apt description. Nara’s wide-eyed figures have become some of the most recognised motifs in contemporary art. His work engages with us emotionally, exemplifying how the power of art can transcend beyond the walls of a gallery to reach people far and wide.”

Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, says: “‘Rendered in an appealing and deceptively simple style, Nara’s portraits of imaginary characters evince a psychological immediacy that bridges the gap between high art and popular culture. Conveying a compelling tenderness that speaks to our desire for connection, his pictures also tap into widespread feelings of alienation, anxiety, and resistance. This is a rare achievement and it has made him one of the pivotal figures in contemporary art over the past 30 years.’”

Yoshitomo Nara is curated by Hayward Gallery Senior Curator, Yung Ma, with Assistant Curator, Katie Guggenheim, and Curatorial Assistant, Charlotte dos Santos.

HAYWARD GALLERY

Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London 

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love @ The Broad, Los Angeles + Other Venues

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

The Broad, Los Angeles

May 25 - September 29, 2024

Mickalene Thomas 

Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge, 2023 

Rhinestones, acrylic and glitter on canvas mounted on

wood panel. 90 x 110 in (228.6 x 279.4 cm) 

© Mickalene Thomas

The Broad announces the launch of a new touring special exhibition Mickalene Thomas: All About Love. Co-organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles, and in partnership with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is the first major international tour of this pioneering artist’s work. Marking its debut at The Broad with over 80 works made by the artist over the last 20 years, the exhibition highlights how Thomas has mastered and innovated within several disciplines, from mixed-media painting and collage to installation and photography. The exhibition shares its title and several of its themes with the pivotal text by feminist author bell hooks, in which love is an active process rooted in healing, carving a path away from domination and towards collective liberation.

Born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey, Mickalene Thomas completed her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2002 and a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003. Soon after she became well known for her large-scale acrylic paintings of Black women in states of leisure and repose using rhinestones, a central material in her practice that symbolizes the complexities of femininity. Depicting women with confident and assured expressions, the subjects of her works are often seen in domestic interiors from Black America, claiming the agency of womanhood while deconstructing the art historical canon. Similarly, Mickalene Thomas’s photographs, collages, and figurative paintings often re-stage scenes from 19th century French painters such as Henri Matisse and Édouard Manet, pushing back against the subjugation and oppressive narratives upheld by Western archives, cultural institutions, and representation systems.

“In Mickalene Thomas’s hands, collage becomes a way of thinking about love in a serious way,” said Ed Schad, Curator at The Broad. “As Thomas keeps the essence of individuals alive in her work – as the individuals are re-imagined and remade, configured from different moods and different circumstances over many years of trust and commitment – it is a love ethic she is after.”

The Broad’s debut of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love reflects some of the artist’s earliest inquiries into visual culture, sexuality, memory, and erotica and move into the present. On view will be the early photographic triptych, Lounging, Standing, Looking (2003), a piece which depicts the artist’s own mother, exploring kinship and care. These modes of intimate relations come to inform work such as Portrait of Maya No. 10 (2017) from the Broad collection. This acrylic and rhinestone work embodies Thomas’s signature ability to apply several layers of material and symbolic meaning into a single surface. At eight feet tall, the subject is empowered, sparkled, and poised, commanding her outward gaze.

The exhibition is largely populated by works at this immersive and ambitious scale, such as the twelve-foot wide I’m Feelin Good (2014) which also uses rhinestone elements. Unifying these larger-than-life subjects together in the museum’s galleries will envelop viewers into the bold and dynamic universe the artist has created, where steadfast love overcomes political strife. In addition to towering wall works, video collages such as Angelitos Negros (2016) will also be presented. This work immortalizes the late singer and actress Eartha Kitt, who sings about the absence of Black angels in art history, reflecting a core theme within the exhibition. Through her queries into pop culture and mass media, Mickalene Thomas offers a reverberating demand for Black women to be seen and understood, and for viewers to become what hooks calls “practitioners of love.”

A publication accompanies the exhibition, including Mickalene Thomas in conversation with Hayward Gallery Chief Curator, Rachel Thomas, and essays by Claudia Rankine, Darnell L. Moore, Ed Schad, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, TK Smith, and Christine Kim that cover Thomas’s distinct visual vocabulary, drawing on themes of love, intergenerational female empowerment, and tenets of Black feminist theory. 

THE BROAD

221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

www.thebroad.org

Strange Clay: Ceramics Contemporary Art @ Hayward Gallery, London

Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art 

Hayward Gallery, London

26 October 2022 - 8 January 2023

Beate Kuhn 

Glasbaum, 2001 

Stoneware, porcelain, thrown, assembled 

24 x 40 x 37 cm 

Courtesy the Estate of the Artist. 

Photo: Tony Izaaks

Lubna Chowdhury 

Sign 7, 2021

Glazed ceramic, wooden board

132 x 242 x 4 cm

© Lubna Chowdhary. Courtesy the artist. 

Photo: Andrew Judd

The Hayward Gallery presents Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art, the first large-scale group exhibition in the UK to explore how contemporary artists have used the medium of clay in inventive ways. Given the recent surge of interest in ceramics by artists around the world, as well as countless people who enjoy sculpting clay as a pastime, Strange Clay offers a timely reflection on this vital and popular medium. Featuring 23 international and multi-generational artists, from ceramic legends Betty Woodman, Beate Kuhn, Ron Nagle and Ken Price, to a new generation of artists pushing the boundaries of ceramics today, the exhibition explores the expansive potential of clay through a variety of playful as well as socially-engaged artworks.

Strange Clay features works by Aaron Angell, Salvatore Arancio, Leilah Babirye, Jonathan Baldock, Lubna Chowdhary, Edmund de Waal, Emma Hart, Liu Jianhua, Rachel Kneebone, Serena Korda, Klara Kristalova, Beate Kuhn, Takuro Kuwata, Lindsey Mendick, Ron Nagle, Magdalene Odundo, Woody De Othello, Grayson Perry, Shahpour Pouyan, Ken Price, Brie Ruais, Betty Woodman and David Zink Yi.

Curated by Dr Cliff Lauson, Strange Clay features eccentric abstract sculptures, large immersive installations, fantastical otherworldly figures and uncanny evocations of everyday objects. The artworks vary in scale, finish and technique, and address topics that range from architecture to social justice, the body, the domestic, the political and the organic. Regardless of background or route into the material, all of the artists in the exhibition celebrate the sheer possibility and versatility of clay.

Ron Nagle  

Schmear Campaign, 2012

Ceramic, Glaze, Epoxy resin, China Paint

17.7 x 7.6 x 9.5 cm

© Ron Nagle 

Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery / Modern Art  

Photo: Don Tuttle

Ron Nagle  

Ms. Artismal, 2018

Ceramic, catalyzed polyurethane, epoxy resin, acrylic

17 x 10 x 10 cm

© Ron Nagle. 

Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery / Modern Art 

Photo: Don Tuttle

Among the highlights of the exhibition is the work of Ron Nagle. Born in 1939 in San Francisco where is live and work, this talented artist is know for its colourful abstract expressionist ceramics. For more information on this artist, you can read the posts on two exhibitions (among others) that Matthew Marks Gallery (New York), which represents him, devoted to Ron Nagle : Ron Nagle: Necessary Obstacles (2021) and Ron Nagle: Getting to No (2019).

In a brand new commission for the exhibition, titled Till Death Do Us Part (2022), Lindsey Mendick explores the domestic realm as a site of conflicts and negotiations. A reflection on the ambivalence of domestic settings and relationships, the home is represented as a battleground where vermin infiltrate every corner of the house.

David Zink Yi

Untitled (Architeuthis), 2010

Burnt and glazed clay

29 x 575 x 115 cm / 11 3/8 x 226 3/8 x 45 1/4 inches

© David Zink Yi. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 

Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich

David Zink Yi’s giant ceramic squid, Untitled (Architeuthis) (2010) sprawls across the floor of the gallery, spanning more than 4.8 metres and lying in what appears to be a pool of its own ink. Fascinated by the extreme biological differences between humans and squids, he explores the relationship between myth-making and the construction of identity.

Takuro Kuwata

Untitled, 2016

Porcelain, glaze, pigment, steel, gold, lacquer

288 x 135 x 130 cm

Courtesy: Alison Jacques, London 

© Takuro Kuwata; photo: Robert Glowacki

In his ceramics sculptures, Takuro Kuwata radically reinterprets the shape of a traditional Japanese tea bowl or chawan – a vessel used to prepare and make tea for traditional ceremonies. Greatly varying in scale, the artist’s sculptures are glazed with elaborate colours and textures that evoke organic forms, pushing traditional techniques to create something entirely unique and surprising.

Klara Kristalova

Installation view of Klara Kristalova: Camouflage, 

Perrotin, Paris, September 7 – October 7, 2017

Courtesy Perrotin. Photo: Claire Dorn

Klara Kristalova

Wooden girl, 2021

Stoneware, 62 x 25 x 31 cm

© Klara Kristalova and Perrotin. 

Courtesy Perrotin. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley

Fantastical creatures are displayed in a botanical installation from Klara Kristalova, featuring plants and ceramic sculptures. Roots, moss, grass and branches evoke the forest surrounding the artist’s studio in the Swedish wilderness and the woodland setting of fairy tales.

Woody De Othello 

Won’t Tell, 2018

Ceramic, glaze, acrylic paint, resin, 135.9 x 48.3 x 48.3 cm

© Woody De Othello. Courtesy of the artist; 

Jessica Silverman, San Francisco; and Klarna, New York, NY 

Photo: John Wilson White

Woody De Othello

on and ON, 2020

Ceramic, underglaze, glaze, 43.2 x 43.2 cm

© Woody De Othello. Courtesy of the artist; 

Jessica Silverman, San Francisco; and Klarna, New York, NY 

Photo: John Wilson White

Woody De Othello’s surreal clay sculptures modify the shapes of traditional household objects into over-sized, twisted and sometimes anthropomorphic forms. With his distinct approach to ceramics, Woody Othello reimagines the mundane with a humorous twist while offering a serious reflection on society and race.

Dr Cliff Lauson, Curator of Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art, says: “Strange Clay brings together some of the most exciting artists working in ceramics in recent years. Using innovative methods and techniques, they push the medium to its physical and conceptual limits, producing imaginative artworks that surprise and provoke in equal measure.”

Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, says: “Vibrant, playful and provocative, Strange Clay brings together a diverse range of artists - from across the world as well as the UK - whose work is inventively redefining the place of ceramics in contemporary art. Their work celebrates the medium’s special characteristics in order to explore an array of timely concerns.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Dr Cliff Lauson and Amy Sherlock, texts by Allie Biswas, Jareh Das, Hettie Judah and Jenni Lomax, and a roundtable discussion with four of the artists in the exhibition chaired by Elinor Morgan, co-published by Hayward Publishing and Hatje Cantz.

Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art is curated by Dr Cliff Lauson with Assistant Curator Marie-Charlotte Carrier and Curatorial Assistant Suzanna Petot.

HAYWARD GALLERY

Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Louise Bourgeois @ Hayward Gallery, London - The Woven Child

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child

Hayward Gallery, London

Through 15 May 2022

The Hayward Gallery presents Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, the first major retrospective of this legendary artist to focus exclusively on the works that she made with fabrics and textiles during the final chapter of her storied career. These works, many of which have never been shown before in the UK, comprise one of the greatest late career chapters in the history of art.

The exhibition focuses on the mid-1990s until Louise Bourgeois’s death in 2010; a period during which the artist forged a body of work that re-articulated many of her lifelong concerns in newly provocative and profoundly enlivening ways, including her exploration of identity, sexuality, family relationships, reparation, and memory. In surveying this late body of work, Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child explores what the artist, in her own words, called ‘the magic power of the needle … to repair the damage’ and to offer ‘a claim to forgiveness’.

Louise Bourgeois created an astonishingly inventive, and psychologically charged, range of sculptures using domestic textiles, including clothing, linens and tapestry fragments, often sourced from her own household and personal history. This departure from traditional sculptural materials represented a return to Louise Bourgeois’s roots; her connection to fabric began in her childhood, during which she helped in her family’s tapestry restoration atelier in France. Louise Bourgeois’s decision to create artworks from her clothes and household textiles was thus a means of transforming, as well as preserving, the past. She viewed the actions involved in fabricating these works – cutting, ripping, sewing, joining – in psychological and metaphorical terms, relating them to notions of reparation and to the trauma of separation or abandonment.

Featuring around 90 works, Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child surveys the complete range of fabric artworks that Louise Bourgeois produced during her last two decades. The exhibition includes major installations, notably several of Louise Bourgeois’s monumental Cells, in which hanging configurations of old dresses, slips, and nightwear directly reference her personal history. The imposing installation Spider (1997), and the related Cell piece, Lady in Waiting (2003), incorporate fragments of antique tapestry. Louise Bourgeois understood the spider as both protector and predator, and associated it with her mother, a weaver and tapestry restorer. Its ability to weave a web from its own body was a metaphor that Bourgeois also used to describe her artistic process and is a particularly poignant image within this survey of her fabric work.

The exhibition includes a comprehensive range of figurative sculptures, many of which are missing limbs and heads or feature fantastical bodies that call to mind characters from unsettling fairy tales. Presented in vitrines, suspended from the ceiling, or displayed on plinths, Louise Bourgeois’s fabric figures – which largely portray female bodies – pointedly conjure states of abjection, abandonment, or entrapment. A significant selection of the artist's fabric heads are also showcased, revealing the wide range of expressions that she elaborated in these uncanny and impactful portraits. Also featured is a selection of Louise Bourgeois’s ‘progressions’: columns of stacked textile blocks or lozenges, organised in ascending and descending sequences. With these works, Louise Bourgeois returned to the vertical sculptural forms that dominated her early work in the 1940s and ‘50s, only now rendered in soft materials. Louise Bourgeois regularly revisited and revised motifs from earlier works throughout her career, a practice that reached a climax with a group of four major late works, made during the last five years of her life, in which combinations of different types of sculptures are displayed together in large vitrines. Collectively, they constitute a kind of summary statement of her late fabric art.

In addition to sculpture, the exhibition highlights a wide selection of Louise Bourgeois’s vibrant fabric drawings, books, prints and collages, including collages which feature large-scale clock faces that she produced during the final year of her life.

Philip Larratt-Smith, Curator at The Easton Foundation says: “Louise Bourgeois’s fabric work is a remarkable and unexpected final act. There is no falling off in the fertility of her imagination, no slackening of the impulses behind her astonishing range of formal invention. Taken as a whole, the fabric work is both a summing up and a recalibration of the forms, processes, motifs, and ideas that obsessed Bourgeois over a lifetime.”

Ralph Rugoff, Director at the Hayward Gallery, says: “We are thrilled to present this major retrospective of Louise Bourgeois’s rich and utterly compelling works made with textiles. While touching on many themes central to her earlier works, Louise Bourgeois’s carefully considered use of varied fabrics, including time-worn materials, imbues her late sculptures with a striking sense of intimacy, vulnerability and mortality. Over a decade after the artist’s death, these works continue to challenge us with questions that seem more compelling and urgent than ever.”

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child is curated by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff, with Assistant Curator Katie Guggenheim and Curatorial Assistant Marie-Charlotte Carrier.

The exhibition will tour to Gropius Bau, Berlin from 22 July to 23 October 2022.

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child Catalogue

Published by Hayward Gallery Publishing and Hatje Cantz

Paperback (full flaps), 208 pages, 280 x 240 mm 

136 colour illustrations

ISBN: 978-3-7757-5149-0

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with newly commissioned essays by curator and scholar Lynne Cooke, novelist Rachel Cusk, curator Julienne-Franziska Lorz, and Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff. 

THE HAYWARD GALLERY

Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Mixing It Up: Painting Today @ Hayward Gallery, London - 31 contemporary painters from UK

Mixing It Up: Painting Today 

Hayward Gallery, London

9 September - 12 December 2021 

Hurvin Anderson 

Ascent, 2019 

Acrylic on paper laid on board

© Hurvin Anderson (2021). Courtesy the artist and 

Thomas Dane Gallery. Laura & Barry Townsley, London. 

Photo: Rat Hole Gallery

Jadé Fadojutimi 

Cavernous Resonance, 2020

Oil and oil stick on canvas 

© Jadé Fadojutimi (2021) Courtesy the artist and 

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. Photo: Eva Herzog

Lisa Brice

Smoke and Mirrors, 2020

Ink, gesso, synthetic tempera, chalk and oil pastel

and oil on canvas mounted on board, 200 x 330 cm

© Lisa Brice (2021). Courtesy the artist;

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and

Salon 94, New York. Photo: Mark Blower 

Mixing It Up: Painting Today brings together 31 contemporary painters whose work freely draws on varied image sources, techniques and traditions in order to fashion fresh and compelling works of art that speak to this moment.

Featuring three generations of artists who live and work in the UK, Mixing It Up: Painting Today highlights the UK’s emergence as a vital international centre of contemporary painting. Reflecting the international character of the UK painting scene, the participating artists come from a diverse range of backgrounds and nationalities: over a third of the participating artists were born in other places, including countries in Africa, Asia, South America and North America. Mixing It Up: Painting Today is also the first survey of contemporary painting in the Hayward Gallery’s history in which the majority of the artists are women.

Louise Giovanelli

Cameo, 2021 

Oil on linen, 36 x 25.5 cm

© Louise Giovanelli (2021) Courtesy the artist and 

Workplace, London and Gateshead ; Photo: Michael Pollard

Lubaina Himid 

The Captain and The Mate, 2017-2018 

Acrylic on canvas, 183 x 244 cm

© Lubaina Himid (2021). Courtesy the artist

and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Andy Keate

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami 

Bira, 2019 

Oil on canvas, 150 x 180 cm

© Kudzanai-Violet Hwami  

Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Sophie von Hellermann 

Hope and History, 2021 

Acrylic on canvas, 200 x 190 cm

© Sophie von Hellermann (2021)

Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias (London), 

Greene Naftali (New York), Sies + Höke (Düsseldorf), 

Wentrup Gallery (Berlin). Photo: Ollie Harrop

Rachel Jones  

lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021

Oil pastel and oil stick on canvas, 250 x 160 cm

© Rachel Jones (2021) Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac 

Photo: Eva Herzog

Whilst this multi-generational group of artists doesn’t constitute a new movement or stylistic tendency, they share a significant interest in mining their medium’s exceptional multiplicity, and exploiting its potential as a format in which things can be mixed up as in no other. They frequently create works that sit in between existing categories and genres, and that fashion unexpected associations between the past and the present. Rather than aiming to craft iconic images, they treat the canvas as a site of assemblage where references converge from diverse sources, including advertising, vernacular and documentary photography, viral memes, fashion, medical manuals and cinema, as well as art history. Using the medium as a platform for speculative thinking and unexpected conversations, their paintings oscillate between observation and invention, depiction and allegory, illusion and materiality. Exploring fissures in our conventional ways of looking and thinking, including our conceptions of gender, race and identity, their paintings hint at different ways of thinking about the relationship between individual and collective identities, as well as between self and other.

Allison Katz 

Adult Services, 2019  

Oil, acrylic and iridescent pigments on linen, 200 x 160 cm

© Allison Katz (2021)

Courtesy the artist and The Approach, London

Oscar Murillo 

manifestation, 2019-2020 

Oil, oil stick, cotton thread and graphite on canvas, 

velvet and linen, 255 x 155 cm

© Oscar Murillo (2021). Courtesy the artist

and David Zwirner. Photo: Jack Hems

Matthew Krishanu 

Two Boys (Church Tower), 2020

Oil on canvas, 45 x 35 cm

© Matthew Krishanu (2021)

Photo: Peter Mallet

Ralph Rugoff, Director at the Hayward Gallery, says: “If painting is typically pigeon-holed as the most conservative and traditional of art forms, the artists in Mixing It Up offer evidence for a contrary point of view: that in fact painting - thanks to some of its unique characteristics - may in fact be the medium that accommodates the most conceptually adventurous thinking.”

Mixing It Up: Painting Today features 31 artists: Tasha Amini, Hurvin Anderson, Alvaro Barrington, Lydia Blakeley, Gabriella Boyd, Lisa Brice, Gareth Cadwallader, Caroline Coon, Somaya Critchlow, Peter Doig, Jadé Fadojutimi, Denzil Forrester, Louise Giovanelli, Andrew Pierre Hart, Lubaina Himid, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Merlin James, Rachel Jones, Allison Katz, Matthew Krishanu, Graham Little, Oscar Murillo, Mohammed Sami, Samara Scott, Daniel Sinsel, Caragh Thuring, Sophie von Hellermann, Jonathan Wateridge, Rose Wylie, Issy Wood and Vivien Zhang.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with original texts by Jeremy Atherton Lin, Martha Barratt, Ben Eastham, Emily LaBarge, Rosanna Mclaughlin, Rianna Jade Parker and Ralph Rugoff.

Mixing It Up is curated by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff, with Assistant Curator Phoebe Cripps and Curatorial Assistant Thomas Sutton.

HAYWARD GALLERY

Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Douglas Gordon at Hayward Gallery, London - "What have I done" Exhibition curated by James Lingwood and Fiona Bradley

Douglas Gordon: What have I done 

Hayward Gallery, London

1 November 2002 – 5 January 2003

Douglas Gordon is best known for his video installations using classic Hollywood films, particularly those of Alfred Hitchcock. He also uses photography, installation, text and sound to investigate the complexities of human nature. This, his first major London solo exhibition, has been designed by the artist specifically for the Hayward’s distinctive spaces. Showcasing the full range of his art, it combines the epic and the intimate in an atmospheric exploration of doubling and duplicity, biography and autobiography, fact and fiction. 

One of the most prominent artists of his generation, Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) first showed at the Hayward Gallery in 1996 with 24 Hour Psycho, the work which brought him to international attention. 24 Hour Psycho returns to the Hayward as a starting point for this new exploration of Douglas Gordon’s work.

What have I done, the title of the exhibition, is taken from a series in which the artist sporadically sends short, cryptic letters to people, both in and beyond the art world. The implied complicity and duplicity of the phrase is allied to the dark themes of split personality and demonic possession explored by James Hogg in his 19th century novel The Confessions of a Justified Sinner – the book is the inspiration for much of Gordon’s work.

Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) (1997) contrasts possession by good and evil forces, as Douglas Gordon twins the films The Song of Bernadette and The Exorcist on either side of the same screen. A new film, Fog (2002), evokes the atmosphere of James Hogg’s work.

Many of the works in the show are, or appear to be, autobiographical. In the sound piece Something between my mouth and your ear (1994) Douglas Gordon creates a blue room, in which he plays the songs that were in the Top 20 during the nine months he spent in the womb - his first exposure to culture. On a more intimate scale, a number of photographic and video self portraits punctuate the exhibition, including his 1994 piece Kissing with Sodium Pentothal, a truth drug which Douglas Gordon took at a party before kissing unsuspecting fellow guests.

The exhibition is curated by James Lingwood and Fiona Bradley. 

In the book which accompanies the show, twin autobiographies – one written, one pictorial – shadow the art in the exhibition.

Douglas Gordon was born in Glasgow in 1966. He trained at the Glasgow School of Art and the Slade School of Art in London. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally. In addition to winning the Turner Prize in 1996, he was awarded the Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He now lives in Glasgow and New York.

Hayward Gallery notes that parents and guardians are advised that some of the works in this exhibition may be considered unsuitable for children.

HAYWARD GALLERY

South Bank, London SE1

www.hayward.org.uk