The brutalist beacon of the Hayward Gallery is always easy to spot when taking a walk by the river at the Southbank, with its trademark yellow staircase and its idiosyncratic shape.
Now, it’ll be even easier to spot from space (by which we mean, more realistically, from a rooftop bar or across the bridge), with a beautiful new commission landing from British-Indian artist Bharti Kher.
Her newest piece is called Target Queen, and sits on the Hayward Gallery with a colourful and circular set of patterns on the eastern and southern facade to add a playful addition to the architecture of the building. It runs alongside Bharti Kher’s solo exhibition Alchemies at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which runs until April 27, 2025.
Target Queen symbolises bindis (though sized up a tad!) and the uniquely designed pieces represent those used by South Asian women as cultural and spiritual symbols to mark the third eye across two sides of the Hayward Gallery. Bharti Kher has used bindis in her work since 1995, and she has described how the motif represents a deep cultural identity with “a third eye – one that forges a link between the real and the spiritual conceptual worlds”.
Each symbol is more than three metres in diameter, and are connected to present a powerful piece that beckons viewers over to the brutalist structure and captivates them with the spiritual message and energy.
Speaking on Target Queen, Bharti Kher says: “My outdoor work is a key part of my practice, so I couldn’t be more delighted to be working with a space as renowned as the Hayward Gallery to present this work for the first time at a London institution. Target Queen is a bold, vibrant and powerful artwork that calls for greater representation of femininity and divinity, also as an exciting exploration of how the two intersect.”
You can see ‘Target Queen’ by Bharti Kher’ on the exterior of the Hayward Gallery now.