London’s Hayward Gallery is Celebrating its 50th Birthday with 50p Tickets

London’s Hayward Gallery is celebrating its 50th birthday with a special anniversary series of commemorative events – including 50p tickets to the Lee Bul exhibition currently on show at the gallery.

The tickets will be dropped from their usual prize of GBP£14.50 on Wednesday 11 July 2018, with special extended opening hours of 11am to 9pm. The gallery has also worked in partnership with Google Arts & Culture on the digitizing of archival material from 50 landmark exhibitions since the gallery’s opening in 1968 – including ‘Henri Matisse 1869-1954: A Retrospective Exhibition’ (1968) and ‘Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound’ (2000).

Meanwhile Fifty Years of Great Art Writing, a publication that features 47 essays by writers and artists including Dave Eggers, Stuart Hall and Ali Smith, produced by Hayward Gallery Publishing, will also be made available.

The Hayward’s director Ralph Rugoff commented: ‘For 50 years the Hayward Gallery has been a crucial visual arts and architectural landmark in London and worldwide. Celebrating the work of some of the world’s most influential artists, it has also produced many ground-breaking group exhibitions. We are delighted to have marked the gallery’s 50th anniversary year with our recent major refurbishment which included the installation of 66 new glass pyramid rooflights, allowing adjustable natural light into the upper galleries for the very first time realising the original architectural vision for this unique and adventurous space.’ Rugoff was announced as the curator of the 2019 Venice Biennale at the end of last year.

The Hayward was on hiatus since September 2015 for a period of major renovation works, carried out by architects Feilden Clegg Bradley. It opened in January with a major Andreas Gursky retrospective: ‘visions of a hyper-capitalist world on steroids,’ our critic wrote at the time.