At Goodwood Art Foundation, contemporary art has been installed across 70 acres of the South Downs, where wildflower meadows, ancient woodland and the ever-changing English light become part of the exhibition. Following the death of Yayoi Kusama, whose work stands within the landscape here, a late-summer visit takes on an unexpected poignancy.
There is something wonderfully contradictory about contemporary art in the English countryside.
We are accustomed to finding artworks within the immaculate white spaces of the city: behind glass doors, beneath carefully calibrated lighting, accompanied by the low murmur of gallery voices. At Goodwood Art Foundation, it is almost as if it has escaped.
Here, on the edge of the South Downs in West Sussex, art is encountered among meadow grasses and old trees, beneath clouds that threaten rain and then, in the particularly capricious way of an English summer, suddenly reveal great expanses of blue. There are no pavements dictating the route. Instead, paths disappear into woodland, sculptures emerge between branches and the landscape itself becomes part of the composition.
Goodwood Art Foundation is a relatively new arrival, but its setting feels anything but. Its 70 acres encompass wooded glades, ancient woodland and wildflower meadows, reimagined by the landscape designer Dan Pearson. The result isn’t a manicured sculpture garden so much as a conversation between cultivated landscape and the slightly unruly character of the countryside.
And the result, is that the art has been given room to breathe.
Nancy Holt’s work seems particularly at home here. The pioneering American land artist spent much of her career examining our relationship with landscape, light and the cosmos. At Goodwood, Hydra’s Head – six pools positioned according to the Hydra constellation – occupies a chalk quarry, holding fragments of the Sussex sky in its water.
Elsewhere, Hélio Oiticica’s Magic Square #3, exhibited for the first time outside of Brazil, provides an almost shocking interruption of colour. Its vivid architectural planes rise from the landscape with the confidence of something that has no intention of blending in. You walk through it rather than around it, glimpsing the countryside between great planes of colour. Green meadow, blue sky and woodland suddenly become framed pictures of their own.
Then, somewhere in the landscape, there is the unmistakable visual language of Yayoi Kusama.
Polka dots. Repetition. A form enlarged beyond the ordinary.
It would have been instantly recognisable at almost any point during the past several decades. Today it feels different.
News of Kusama’s death, aged 97, arrived this week. One of the most recognisable artists of the contemporary era, she continued working almost until the end of an extraordinary life that stretched from pre-war Japan to the avant-garde world of 1960s New York and eventually to a degree of global fame rarely achieved by a living artist.
To encounter her work here now, in the English countryside beneath an enormous blue sky, is to be reminded that art possesses a peculiar ability to outlive its maker.
Kusama spent a lifetime preoccupied with infinity.
The dots for which she became famous were never simply decorative. Their origins lay in hallucinatory experiences she had known since childhood: repeated forms that seemed to spread across the world around her until the distinction between herself and her surroundings began to disappear. She called this idea “self-obliteration”.
Over the decades those dots migrated everywhere – across canvases, rooms, bodies, pumpkins, flowers and monumental sculptures. Her mirrored installations multiplied the viewer endlessly. Her Infinity Nets appeared capable of continuing beyond the edge of the canvas. Repetition became a way of suggesting something without beginning or end.
Seen at Goodwood after her death, that obsession with infinity inevitably acquires another meaning.
The artist is gone. The dots continue.
And around them, the countryside continues too.
Perhaps this is why art feels so different outdoors. Museums are designed, in part, to arrest time. Temperature is controlled; light is controlled; objects are conserved against deterioration. The countryside offers no such guarantees.
Rain falls, grass grows. Leaves appear, deepen and eventually drop.
A sculpture seen in June can feel like an entirely different object when encountered beneath the grey skies of November.
Goodwood understands this beautifully. The landscape isn’t merely somewhere to put the art; it is allowed to interfere with it.
Dan Pearson’s planting has been conceived around a succession of seasonal moments rather than a single horticultural crescendo. The effect encourages a different sort of looking. You begin noticing seed heads and shadows, the movement of grasses and the spaces between trees. After a while it becomes difficult to determine where the exhibition ends.
That question – what is the artwork and what is the landscape? Is further brought home with Susan Philipsz enchanting sound installation.
A Lee Ufan sculpture invites contemplation of material, space and presence. Eva Rothschild’s geometric forms introduce another human language into the organic disorder of the landscape. Holt asks you to look upwards, beyond Sussex altogether, towards the stars.
And Kusama asks you to consider infinity.
There is a pleasing audacity to placing such international contemporary art in this particular corner of England. The South Downs are not dramatic in the conventional sense. There are no Alpine peaks or Mediterranean cliffs. Their beauty is softer: chalk hills, woods, hedgerows and fields rolling towards the sea.
It is precisely this understatement that makes the encounters so compelling.
The English countryside has always been partly imagined. Painters, poets, gardeners and landowners have spent centuries composing our idea of it. What appears natural is frequently the product of intervention: a tree planted to complete a view, a lake excavated to reflect a house, an avenue positioned to draw the eye towards the horizon.
Goodwood simply adds another layer.
Instead of encountering art as something separated from everyday life, you find yourself walking through long grass towards it.
By late afternoon, after several hours outside, the hierarchy between art and landscape has begun to dissolve. You notice the sculptures, certainly, but also the clouds. A particularly beautiful tree becomes as arresting as anything carrying an artist’s name. The shifting light becomes its own installation.
And perhaps this is the pleasure of Goodwood: it slows the act of looking down.
There is time for lunch at 24, where the menu takes its cues from the surrounding landscape and produce from Goodwood’s regenerative farm. With the building housing it, standing proud in architectural glory.
There is time to walk without knowing precisely what you are walking towards. Most importantly, there is space – increasingly rare and increasingly luxurious – simply to pay attention.
Eventually, the path leads back.
But Kusama’s sculpture lingers in the imagination.
For an artist who spent her life trying to represent the infinite, there is something strangely appropriate about encountering her work not in a sealed gallery but beneath the open sky. The countryside around it will continue changing. Summers will become autumns; grasses will disappear and return; visitors will arrive who never lived at the same time as the woman who made it.
Her dots will remain.
Art, like landscape, is one of the ways we negotiate our own impermanence. One changes because we make it; the other reminds us that everything changes regardless.
At Goodwood, on a late-summer afternoon in Sussex, the two seem unusually close.
And following the death of Yayoi Kusama, one of contemporary art’s great explorers of infinity, that meeting of art and the English countryside feels more affecting than ever.