'All of my artworks are given female names,' Renée Levi tells me. We are sitting in her Basel studio beside September, a colossal abstract painting in the vivid, often neon palette that has defined her work for decades. Blues, greens, oranges and pinks, thick with pigment, gather in loose squares and looping circles, each swept across a grid-like industrial mesh with a large mop. Around every mass of colour, Levi has built up zig-zags of silver spray paint. Read from left to right, the forms swell in scale. The surface takes on the look of a map or a geological survey, charting a body moving across it.
The choice of female names is an insistent act to ensure that women are no longer written out of art history. This painting also takes its title from the month of its unveiling on the Hayward's façade on London's South Bank, where it is residing from 23 September to 15 November 2026, marking a shift in seasons when the light changes, the weather turns and the city picks up its pace after summer.
Co-commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, and Levi's first large-scale commission in the UK. Seen from the Royal Festival Hall, September appears a different work from the one in the studio. By day, the colour sits on the iridescent mesh. As the afternoon fades it begins to loosen, and by dusk it has lifted from the surface entirely, hovering against the concrete as though nothing were holding it there.
Renée Levi in her studio
To understand why Levi paints the way she does, it is helpful to know that she did not begin her career as a painter. Born in Istanbul in 1960 and raised in Aargau, Switzerland, she trained as an architect and worked with Herzog & de Meuron in Basel before studying art at the Zurich University of the Arts. Though she sees her early career informing her painting practice.
'It is a kind of continuation,' she says. 'For me, architecture isn't really separate from painting. That separation is something the art market imposes, and it's also a product of how we're taught to think in categories.' Levi thinks of her paintings as objects, and of walls and façades as structures that dictate scale, material and gesture. She has made several public interventions since early in her career, including a commission for the pediment of the Federal Palace in Bern, and her practice has been recognised with the Prix Meret Oppenheim and the Prix de la Société des Arts de Genève. The Hayward is the latest commission in a long investigation into what painting can do to a building, and what a building can do to a painting.
The Hayward is a Grade-II listed landmark, all exposed concrete, jutting forms and hard and fast geometry. Levi’s first visit to the South Bank was on a cold, rainy day, and she read the site closely, with its worn cement paving, an outdoor seating area she describes as ‘full of unrealised wishes’, awkward stairs and yellow concrete elements dating from the seventies. What emerged responds directly to the building's own composition. September takes the Hayward's distinctive protruding rectangular window, often called the ‘eye’ of the building, and makes it part of the painting, extending the work above and below it. Rather than laying an image over the façade, Levi has let the architecture set the terms.
Levi's method is, on its surface, disarmingly simple. She paints in a single continuous passage, left to right, like writing, without correction or overpainting. In her own words: 'Drawing is an immediate, bodily act in situ within a site that determines material, scale, and action… Rules arise within the act and exclude correction, overpainting, and composition.' The immediacy, though, rests on long stretches of preparation and patience. 'You have to understand that I take a lot of breaks,' she says. 'Sometimes I'll go three months without painting, and then I decide it's time to work again.'
She arrives at that moment without a picture in mind, but with everything else settled: the brush, the material, the size of the surface, the colours. 'The preparation actually takes much more time than the painting itself, precisely so that I'm not interrupted once I start.' For September, that meant buying several large mop brushes in advance, one for red, one for blue, one for green, so she would never have to stop and switch. She works with an assistant, but needs silence and concentration above all.
In the studio of Renée Levi
Because the act of painting is everything, Levi does not believe in failure in the usual sense. 'There is no “bad”,’ she says, 'because I really believe in the moment of doing.' The scale of each gesture is governed by the reach of her own body. On the Hayward's surface, no mark exceeds what a human arm can make. Up close, a colossal public painting turns out to be a record of one person moving. Painting outdoors on the Thames for two months posed practical questions for the commission too. The answer was an industrial mesh, the kind usually used for large-scale advertising, which lets air pass through the surface and withstands the weather. There is no system to the palette. 'It's mostly about what makes me happy in the moment,' she says.
What makes September unusual, even within Levi's own practice, is where it will be seen. Painting at this scale as urban public art is new territory for her, and the South Bank as a thoroughfare of commuters, tourists, skateboarders, concert-goers heading to the Royal Festival Hall. Most people will not stand before the work so much as move past it. Levi has embraced that. 'The work can never be seen all at once,' she says. 'It is encountered in passing, from different distances and viewpoints, and perhaps something different is noticed each time.' The painting, she suggests, unfolds twice: first in the act of making it, and again in the movement of the people who walk by. Hayward curator Yung Ma sees it as a disruption of the grey façade, a work that turns an ordinary riverside walk into an unexpected meeting with colour.
Renée Levi and Audemars Piguet Contemporary curator Audrey Teichmann
For eight weeks, it will slip into the routine of the people who pass it every day, glimpsed at an angle from the bridge, the river path or the top deck of a bus. September's sun sits lower than the summer sunlight, and by late afternoon it glows across the South Bank, turning the grey concrete briefly to honey and catching the mesh so the whole surface shimmers. Against that warmth the neons burn hotter, while the silver zig-zags flare and vanish as the angle changes. As the weeks run on towards November, the light will shorten and cool, the shadows of Hayward's own jutting forms will stretch further across the painting, and the colour, deprived of sun, will begin its evening float earlier each day. As the days change, no passers-by will see quite the work in quite the same way. Then it will be gone. Levi, characteristically, is most interested in that moment. ‘For a limited time, September changes the appearance of the Hayward Gallery. And when the work disappears again, those who have passed it before may notice that something is missing.’
Renée Levi's September, co-commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, is on view on the façade of the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, from 23 September to 15 November 2026