There is something quietly instructive about the fact that the Renée Levi Hayward Gallery commission, a large-scale outdoor work that will drape the building’s famous brutalist exterior in painterly gesture, is being used as the occasion for a writing opportunity. Dazed Club is seeking an emerging arts writer to interview Levi ahead of the opening, with the resulting piece published on Dazed Digital.
The commission itself is called September. It opens on 23 September and, according to Artsy, will remain on view until 15 November 2026, giving it a run of nearly two months on the South Bank. The work marks Levi’s first large-scale public commission in the UK and is co-commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet Contemporary.
Paint at architectural scale: what September actually involves
Levi is a Swiss artist whose practice has long been anchored in gestural, painterly abstraction. Translating that sensibility onto the surface of the Hayward Gallery is not a straightforward proposition. The building’s concrete terraces and angular geometry are not a neutral ground; they carry their own argument about weight, surface and time. Artsy reports that September will be realised using an industrial mesh support, a structural solution that allows Levi’s work to adapt to the demands of the outdoor environment without compromising the ambition of the gesture.
Audrey Teichmann, Curator at Audemars Piguet Contemporary, has described the approach in terms that are worth dwelling on: ‘Levi approaches the Hayward Gallery’s exterior as more than a backdrop, responding to its rhythm, materiality and scale.’ The phrasing is deliberate. A backdrop implies passivity, something to be painted over. What Teichmann is pointing to is a more reciprocal relationship, in which the building’s mass and texture become active elements in the composition rather than obstacles to be resolved.
The Renée Levi Hayward Gallery commission sits within a longer conversation Audemars Piguet Contemporary has been having with artists since the organisation was founded in 2012 to invite international artists to create ambitious works, according to Art Basel. The organisation has, by its own account, followed Levi’s practice for years before arriving at this particular collaboration, working with the Hayward to develop a project that takes the building’s surface as material rather than merely as site.
The Dazed Club opportunity and what it asks of a writer
The writing commission being offered through Dazed Club is positioned as part of this same ecology. An emerging arts writer, selected from the Dazed Club membership, will be commissioned to conduct the interview with Levi; the Q&A will be published on Dazed Digital as part of a wider collaboration between Dazed Club and Audemars Piguet Contemporary. The application is open now through the Dazed Club app.
That the interview will appear alongside a project of this scale is not a minor detail. Interviews with artists at the moment of a commission tend to produce something different from retrospective conversations: the work is not yet fixed in critical language, the artist is still inside it, and the writer has a chance to catch something before interpretation closes around the object. For an emerging writer, that is a genuinely useful position to be in.
The collaboration extends further. On 12 October, Dazed Club will host an event at Southbank Centre’s St Paul’s Pavilion, bringing together Dazed Club members and the wider arts community around Levi’s work and the ideas animating the commission. It is the kind of event that exists at the junction between the social and the critical, which is, increasingly, where the most interesting conversations about contemporary art happen to take place.
September opens at the Hayward Gallery on 23 September and runs until 15 November 2026. Writers wishing to apply for the interview commission can do so via the Dazed Club app.
