Southbank Centre’s new open-air exhibition Winter Light to run until February

A new free open-air exhibition will brighten Southbank’s iconic buildings and the Riverside Walk with luminous, playful and thought-provoking artworks during the darkest months of the year.

Southbank Centre presents Winter Light featuring a range of leading international artists.

Winter Light includes 17 artworks and new commissions that make use of light, colour and animation whilst touching on diverse concerns.

The artworks and new commissions will start to pop-up across Southbank Centre’s buildings and facades, and along the riverside, from today, with artworks being installed up until the new year.

They will remain on display until the end of February.

At a time when we view so much of the world through digital screens, the artists in this exhibition celebrate how the medium of light can transform our physical spaces.

Their artworks also explore ideas about nature, politics and society, gender, aesthetics and the act of looking.

A row of trees will be illuminated with glowing neon flex creating a multicoloured canopy over the heads of pedestrians by David Ogle.

Martin Richman will create a new lightwork for the 5th floor balcony of the Royal Festival Hall.

Reflect suggests the rippling of the nearby River Thames and uses light, colour and movement to create a shimmering, multi-layered space visible from afar.

Hung prominently in the Hayward Gallery foyer, Katie Paterson’s exhibition Totality, is a ‘mirror ball’ that documents every solar eclipse recorded by humankind.

Using nearly 10,000 tiny images, Paterson’s artwork reveals the beauty in the natural phenomena of our greatest source of illumination, the sun.

Large-scale videos projected onto the Royal Festival Hall will include Emma Talbot’s animation Birds, Freedom, 2020 which presents a female figure navigating a landscape made up of abstract patterns and colours, Cedar Lewisohn and Cliff Lauson, curators of Winter Light, said: “As the winter darkness descends, this outdoor exhibition radiates light.

“We have worked with a number of artists to create an uplifting experience and to provide artistic inspiration for visitors during these challenging times.”

Main Pic: Detail of Sixty Minute Spectrum (2017) by David Batchelor on display at Hayward Gallery
Picture: Morley Von Sternberg