Conceived as a site-responsive intervention, the work will engage directly with the Hayward Gallery’s iconic Brutalist architecture, taking the building’s distinctive protrusions and windows as its points of departure, reframing these elements as part of a newly activated exterior surface. Extending across the façade, the work will connect surfaces above and below through a continuous painterly gesture, activating the building as both image and field.
The co-commission builds on Levi’s longstanding exploration of painting as a direct, bodily act, as well as her sustained engagement with architectural space, informed by her architectural background. Emerging from her studio-based drawing practice, her work translates gesture into space, responding to the physical and architectural conditions of each site, something that has remained central to her practice. At the Hayward Gallery, this approach will unfold at a monumental scale, shaped by the specific constraints and possibilities of the outdoor environment.
Trained in architecture at HTL Muttenz/Basel, Renée Levi has consistently explored the spatial and architectural conditions of painting. From her early wall-based works to more recent large‑scale interventions, she approaches painting as an operative practice, one that conceals, reveals, filters and reshapes the surfaces it inhabits. Central to Levi’s methodology is not the production of a predetermined image, but the temporal unfolding of the gesture itself. Her works emerge through an encounter between body, material and site, foregrounding painting as a performative, situational process.
Realised using an industrial mesh support allowing the work to adapt to the outdoor environment, the co-commission will mark a new development in Levi’s practice. This material requires a preparatory process that both enables and challenges the act of painting, introducing new parameters for surface, colour and visibility. Produced in modular sections and assembled on site, the work will exist both as a single composition and an expandable series, adapting to the geometry of the façade. Extending her practice into this context will introduce new spatial and material conditions, expanding the ways in which her painterly language can be articulated in the public realm.
This extended process of testing and experimentation resonates with Audemars Piguet’s own approach to innovation, where new materials, processes and forms are explored through iterative development and drive meaningful change in performance and craft. Within this shared commitment to research and materiality, Levi’s work unfolds through a dialogue between constraint and possibility, allowing new visual languages to emerge over time. The commission also marks a significant moment for Audemars Piguet Contemporary, as the first painting commissioned by the programme.
Additional 2026 Programming
Audemars Piguet Contemporary continues its 2026 programme with major institutional presentations of earlier commissioned works, reinforcing its commitment to supporting artists beyond the original commission and ensuring projects continue to reach new audiences and contexts. Through sustained dialogue and collaboration, the programme accompanies artists over time, creating the conditions for new areas of practice and lines of research to emerge, resonating across different contexts.
Opening 30 May, Kunstmuseum Basel will present Cao Fei’s Testimonies to the Near Future, which will feature Isle of Instability, a work commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary in 2020. Created in response to the global pandemic, Cao Fei’s Isle of Instability reimagines her personal experience of lockdown — documented in Singapore with her family — as a multimedia reflection on isolation, resilience, and our shared emotional landscape. Positioned within the broader exhibition, the work continues its institutional trajectory in dialogue with Cao Fei’s ongoing investigation into technology, urban transformation and speculative futures.
Adrián Villar Rojas’ exhibition First Gods, Lost Animals will open at Aspen Art Museum on 2 July. Central to this multi-floor presentation is Untitled (From the Series The Language of the Enemy), co-commissioned by Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary. Following its first presentation in Le Brassus in 2025, the brand’s birthplace, the work will enter into dialogue with a new body of site-specific works conceived for the Aspen exhibition. The work imagines a prehistoric meeting between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as a possible moment when the first gestures of meaning or image-making passed between species. Here, Villar Rojas proposes a theoretical history that challenges prevailing anthropocentric narratives of human exceptionalism.
