Outdoor Art in London

LONDON—It’s mid-July, and all is quiet in London’s usual art world haunts. Most galleries have opened their summer shows, the last before their two-week shutdown in August; the Tate, Serpentine, and Hayward have thrown their annual summer parties; and most art-goers are taking a well-earned rest before the furious pre-Frieze gallivanting begins this fall.

Picking up the slack, though, are a slew of season-friendly outdoor options in the city’s parks and beyond. ARTINFO presents five of the best.

1. "The Artist’s Playground" at Sudeley Castle, through October 31

This year’s Sudeley Castle contemporary art exhibition, the fourth in a series of annual shows held on the grounds of the partially ruined castle in Gloucestershire, in southwest England, has a stellar line-up of artists, designers, and architects. Curator Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, who founded Gagosian’s first U.K. gallery and is now heading up the new Center of Contemporary Culture Moscow, belongs to the family that owns the ancestral country mansion. She gave the exhibitors carte blanche for the show, and the best results are those that have either actively reacted against or harmonized with the landscape. Ai Weiwei’s vibrant blue Pillars (2006–07), for example, are alien to the long grasses they inhabit, yet the work’s beauty reinforces that of its surroundings. Henry Krokatsis, meanwhile, reminds us of the castle’s fairytale connotations with Ambo (2008), an ornate iron treehouse in the form of the building's turret that seems to lack only a Rapunzel.

One of the show’s most successful installations is also one of the subtlest. For Lifestyle Sculpture 1–4 (2008), Richard Woods has painted Sudeley’s doors with bright, cheerful colors, demonstrating how the image of the castle has been redrawn in our modern minds. Once a symbol of strength against threats of invasion and war, these structures are now more evocative of Disney’s Magical Kingdom than bastions of defense.

Other artists in the show include Michael Craig-Martin, Tom Dixon, Kevin Francis Gray, Zaha Hadid, Jeppe Hein, Carsten Höller, James Hopkins, Arik Levy, Jonathan Monk, Rolf Sachs, Piotr Uklanski, and Lawrence Weiner.

2. The Serpentine Pavilion by Frank Gehry, July 20 – October 19

Frank Gehry has no buildings in England. If this rankles him (as it does fellow avant-provocateur Zaha Hadid, who blames the staidness of the U.K. real estate industry), the launch of this year’s annual Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion, which Gehry designed with his son Samuel, should allay some of that frustration. Since 2000 the Serpentine has invited an artist or architect each year (previous selections include Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, Rem Koolhaas, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind, and Hadid) to design a temporary space to house its summer café, public events, and private parties. For his contribution, Gehry has envisioned a contemporary urban passageway from Kensington Gardens to the gallery, featuring a confusion of timber planking and glass plates supported by four giant steel columns embedded in the earth. Flanking the path will be a series of raised platforms that add a performative, voyeuristic element to the installation, as visitors on the platforms look at those on the path, and vice-versa. Park life just got cooler.

3. Isamu Noguchi at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, July 18, 2008 – February 22, 2009

Isamu Noguchi may be a big name in the U.S. and Japan, but in Europe he has a much lower profile. This summer, European audiences will get their first substantial look at his work at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where the artist’s ceramics, furniture, and stone-carved sculpture will be exhibited throughout the 500-acre, 18th-century site.

The Japanese-American artist, who died in 1988, originally trained with Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who carved the American presidents into Mount Rushmore. Although Borglum is said to have been unimpressed by his pupil’s work, Noguchi persevered, at first creating work that reflected Constructivist and Futurist forms and later turning toward a more organic abstraction, rather in the style of Britain’s most lauded sculptor, Henry Moore. (Coincidentally, Moore, in an unintended exchange, will be enjoying a retrospective at New York’s Botanical Gardens this summer.) Also on view at the YSP is a smaller exhibition of the British artist Sarah Staton.

4. Latitude Festival, July 17–20

An integral part of the British summer is the music festival. Usually these are beer-fueled, mud-bound pursuits with a rock soundtrack, but one in particular is trying to offer something more.

This weekend’s Latitude, a program of music, dance, and theater headlined by Franz Ferdinand, Sigur Ros, and Interpol and set in the rolling Suffolk countryside on England’s east coast, has invited Lavish, an arts curating company, to commission installations for the festival site’s lake and woodlands. Artists Maslen & Mehra have created small, mirrored sculptural silhouettes of urban stereotypes (the stuffy businessman, the floppy-haired skater, etc.) that will be scattered about the forest, poking fun at the average city dweller’s concept of “roughing it” in the confines of a carefully organized festival. James Reuben has installed full-size doors throughout the woods, evoking portals to alternate realities while acknowledging the festival as a world of freedom and excesses away from the everyday. The curators are to be applauded for offering something complex and contemplative in the midst of the noisy, crowded festival.  

5. Portavillion, through September 28 (except The Wind House, on view July 26 – October 19)

Back to London’s parks, where the nonprofit Up Projects has commissioned leading artists to produce pavilions in several of the city’s best-known green spaces.

American artist Dan Graham combines glass and two-way mirrors in his Holland Park installation Triangular Pavilion with Circular Cut-out (2008). Annika Eriksson, from Sweden, offers The Smallest Cinema in the World – For the Wealthy and the Good, a six-person cinema in Regent Park that features a series of films meditating on the park’s users and visitors. And in Potters Fields Park, British artist Toby Patterson presents a geometric powder-blue structure meant to complement the Southbank Centre building, just a few blocks away.

But the best of the series may be Monika Sosnowska’s work, which opens July 26 on Primrose Hill, one of the most beautiful vistas in London. Like her contribution to the Polish Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, in which she forced a too-large steel structure into the confines of the gallery space by bending and twisting the metal, the new installation shocks at first, then gives way to a peculiar, moving beauty. The Wind House looks at first glance like a building that has been partially, and violently, destroyed. But look closer and the dented walls and torn roof also suggest intrigue and narrative: What is the small, lonesome house doing here? Who might have lived here? What happened to them? The work’s seemingly desolate architecture cannot obscure its fundamental humanity.