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Members-Only Hours: When Forms Come Alive

Get up close to the erupting, melting, shifting and flowing sculptures on display, away from the crowds at this Members-only event.

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Spanning over 60 years of contemporary sculpture, this exhibition highlights ways in which artists draw on familiar experiences of movement, flux and organic growth.

Inspired by sources ranging from a dancer’s gesture to the breaking of a wave, from a flow of molten metal to the interlacing of a spider’s web, the artworks in When Forms Come Alive conjure fluid and shifting realms of experience.

Undulating, drooping, erupting, cascading and promiscuously proliferating, these sculptures invite a tactile gaze, and trigger physical responses. In an era when our encounters are increasingly digitised and disembodied, these artworks call to mind the pleasures of gesture and movement, the poetics of gravity and the experience of sensation itself.

Palpably dynamic, they proclaim that nothing in the world stays the same, that everything is moving, seething, changing and transforming.

The exhibition features work by 21 international artists: Ruth Asawa, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Lynda Benglis, Michel Blazy, Paloma Bosquê, Olaf Brzeski, Choi Jeong Hwa, Tara Donovan, DRIFT, Eva Fàbregas, Holly Hendry, EJ Hill, Marguerite Humeau, Jean-Luc Moulène, Senga Nengudi, Ernesto Neto, Martin Puryear, Matthew Ronay, Teresa Solar Abboud and Franz West.

The exhibition is generously supported by the When Forms Come Alive Exhibition Supporters’ Group: Bianca and Stuart Roden, Simon Morris and Annalisa Burello, White Cube, Thomas Dane Gallery, Gagosian, Sprüth Magers, David Zwirner Gallery and Sarah Cannon. Additional support has also kindly been provided by the Henry Moore Foundation, Hauser & Wirth and Fluxus Art Projects.

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Event information

Tickets are limited to two per Member.

For your visit

This event is held at the Hayward Gallery Southbank Centre

Tuesday – Thursday, 10am – 6pm
Friday, 10am – 9pm
Saturday, 10am – 8pm
Sunday, 10am – 6pm

Closed Mondays