1. Hayward gallery entrance (Morley von Sternberg)
    Morley von Sternberg
  2. Hayward gallery architecture (Jonathan Perugia / Time Out)
    Jonathan Perugia / Time Out
  3. Hayward gallery architecture (Jonathan Perugia / Time Out)
    Jonathan Perugia / Time Out
  4. Hayward gallery at night (Sheila Burnett)
    Sheila Burnett

Hayward Gallery

  • Art | Performance art
  • South Bank
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

After closing for a two-year refurbishment, the South Bank’s greatest heap of concrete brutalism thankfully reopened its doors last year. The refurb has brought light spilling into its spaces, and the programming – Diane Arbus, Lee Bul and Andreas Gursky, among others – is as brilliant as ever. Plus, Prince Charles really, really hates the building. If that doesn’t make you love it, nothing will.

Details

Address
Southbank Centre
London
SE1 8XX
Transport:
Tube: Waterloo
Price:
Varies
Opening hours:
Mon, Wed, Fri, Sat, Sun 11am-7pm; Thu 11am-9pm
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What’s on

Yoshitomo Nara

4 out of 5 stars
If eyes truly are the windows to the soul, then the intensely staring, delinquent characters created by Yoshimoto Nara have a lot going on inside. As one of the best-known (and best-selling) Japanese artists of our time, Nara has earned this massive retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. It’s his largest ever UK exhibition by far: spanning not only his paintings, but also drawings, installations, and sculpture across a four-decades-long career. On entering, you’re confronted with a rickety wooden house, complete with a patchwork corrugated iron roof and glass windows revealing a homey room scattered with drawings. Rock music whirs from the TV and empty beer cans litter one corner: this feels like a place of peace, a sanctuary where Nara’s interests and comforts intersect. Here, we’re introduced to his punkish tendencies – not only in his musical tastes (in some works, he plays up to his inner fangirl, scribbling ‘thank you for Ramones’ around a rough coloured-in cartoon), but also in attitude. This is an artist that is all about playing with innocence – like sticking cigarettes in children’s mouths – and protest, scrawling slogans about ending nukes in capital letters and adding pacifist symbolism to clothing. Nara is known for his kawaii, manga-esque figures which might look lost and sad as much as naughty and demonic. Some are loud, brash: like his collection of solid-lined paint marker drawings on paper. Others, like After the Acid Rain, 2006, appear innocent until you...
  • Contemporary art

Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi: Freudian Typo

In the Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space, two Iranian-Canadian artists are having fun with language. Sculpture, video and found objects all find their place in this playful exhibition that juxtaposes words and images to show us the precarity of truth and meaning in today’s world. From a hyper-realistic sculpture to a repurposed electric motorway sign, Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi find many ways to combine the quotidian with the uncanny.

Gilbert and George: ‘21st Century Pictures’

It’s not that long ago that British art bigwigs Gilbert & George grew so frustrated with what they saw as a lack of attention from the UK’s art institutions that they set up their very own museum dedicated to themselves. That big whinge seems a bit premature now that the Hayward is giving them a big exhibition looking at their work since the turn of the millennium, a period that has seen them satirising everything from hope and fear to sex and religion.
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