The Goodwood estate in Sussex is famed for speed. Its annual Festival of Speed is a celebration of F1 cars and high-octane racing around its 2.4km circuit. A bit slower, but still pretty fast, with the Goodwood Revival iconic 1940s to 1960s race cars rev their engines and screech around corners. Then there’s the Goodwood Festival, a central fixture in the horse racing flat-racing season. You can even take a plane up into the skies to look down upon the 11,000 acres of downland countryside it all takes place in – not to mention Goodwoof, at which canine participants can still travel pretty fast…

Now there’s an option to slow down. Goodwood Art Foundation is a new not-for-profit offer at the estate that invites an altogether different pace of experience. 70 acres of the estate have been landscaped as a setting for a changing programme of contemporary art, both inside dedicated galleries and with sculptures secreted amongst the varied planting. This summer marks the inaugural season of the venture.




There has been art here before. From 1992 until 2020 it was the site of the Cass Sculpture Foundation, an organisation that over its life facilitated the fabrication of 150 works by celebrated British artists. Wilfred Cass, who co-founded the venture with his wife Jeanette, passed in 2022, but the owner of the estate, the Duke of Richmond, wanted to ensure visual art continued to have a life in the landscape.

Three years later, sculpture has returned. It could have been sooner if the team, led by art consultant Ann Gallagher, had simply wanted to drop readymade sculptures into the site, but something with deeper roots and richer growth was wanted. Award winning landscape architect Dan Pearson was brought in to reconsider the site and develop a new planting scheme with a sensitivity, wild aesthetic, and sense of place. Pearson is known for gentle and thoughtful projects such as the landscape of Althorp House after the death of Dianna Princess of Wales, the courtyard garden at London’s Garden Museum, work on the Chatsworth House estate, as well as gardens for creatives including Juergen Teller, Edmund de Waal, Jony Ive, and Paul Smith. His designs are not known for excess or showiness (other than an ill-advised moment working on the Thames Garden Bridge project by Joanna Lumley, Boris Johnson, and Thomas Heatherwick) and thus Pearson was a good choice for a Goodwood landscape that wanted to not just slow visitors down to read the pace of landscape, but to also allow the place itself to slowly evolve with the seasons and its own maturing.




Pearson’s scheme, which is subtle and carefully woven into the existing place so as not to shout the intervention loudly, is designed to evolve throughout the year so not only does it change seasonally, but each month visitors would read a different feel and evolution of growth. But the work does not stop at design, because Pearson has also devised an ongoing programme of landscape development and management to allow the project to nurture, an approach that will sit alongside new outreach projects with schools to connect the landscape with activities, art-making, and education in a setting that many young people cannot normally benefit from. The Foundation are also constructing a new learning hub in the woods with a team of educators, from which younger visitors can base their learning, making, and play.

The inaugural Goodwood Art Foundation season opens with a headline exhibition from Rachel Whiteread. An artist interested in the relationship between architectural space and artistic form more than any other, there is an uncanny welcomeness to presenting Whiteread’s urban forms within such a pastoral setting. An existing gallery pavilion designed by Studio Downie Architects has been refreshed and modernised for the new Foundation, here reopening with two large Whiteread sculptures taking centre stage. Doppelgänger (2020-21) is an assemblage of corrugated iron and wooden planks reminiscent of a derelict shed. Painted white to almost disappear into the white-walled gallery, it is different to the artist’s recognisable concrete negative space reliefs of forms, though still speaks to Whiteread’s deep interest in architecture – albeit here in collapse and decay.




In The gallery next door, Bergamo III (2023) is a grid of 12 stone sculptures, carved into the form of the negative space under a chair. Here, as often in the artist’s work, absence is present, but so is the possible situation that such an arrangement of chairs may require. There is a missing story here, a seeming past narrative of what may have occurred with these seats, now only recorded through a solid memory of a trace. The stones are all sourced from quarries near the Italian city, each with its own identity, veins, and deep histories, extracted and relocated, positioned and feeding this idea of what has gone before.

On surrounding walls, rarely shown photographs by Whiteread reveal some of her process of reading urban and architectural spaces. Not artworks in their own right, and not really of photographic quality to sustain a solo exhibition, they nonetheless reveal process and vision as any sketch does, and here are poetically arranged in triptychs to draw connections and thoughts between disparate situations and places.




Three further Whiteread sculptures can be found amongst Dan Pearson’s landscapes. Untitled (Pair) (1999) sits in a glade, the forms are cast from mortuary slabs then covered in gloss paint, an uncanny interjection into a pastoral setting surrounded by birdsong and late-Spring flowering, but perhaps a reminder that such landscapes are continual cycles of death and rebirth.

Detached (2012) sits slightly off a main path, needing to be discovered to be properly read. One of Whiteread’s concrete casts of everyday, overlooked rural structures, this celebrates a rural form but remade as urban brutalism, then allowed to slowly melt back into growing, encompassing nature. A short walk away, Down and Up (2024-25) is a new work from the artist, returning to her often-considered architectural form of the staircase. Here, the inverse space celebrated, what is a transitory, unnoticed, even non-architectural part of the built environment is afforded new presence, given sculptural form and asking the viewer to reconsider their own body in relation to space and time, momentarily stepping outside both.

Other works by other artists dot the 70 acres. Isamu Noguchi’s bright red (see 00020) Octetra (three-element stack) (1965 (2021)) shouts in the lush greenery. One of the artist’s Playscapes series originally designed for an urban park setting, it invites not only physical play but also visual, using its holes to reframe and resee surrounding nature. Veronica Ryan’s Magnolia Blossoms (2025) is seven blossoms sitting on a jute rug mat upon the leaf-littered ground. It’s all made of cast bronze, but represents an organic decay that stays frozen as the surrounding nature repeats its cycles.




Rose Wylie’s Pale-Pink Pineapple/Bomb (2025) stands phallically erect at the centre of an avenue vista. An abstract mashup of the two objects from the title, the work plugs in to the artist’s own autobiography as well as ongoing military violence, here compressed and present even in such rural calm. A second gallery, the Pigott Gallery, is home to a film installation and works on paper by Amie Siegel considering cultural heritage. A largescale, architectural sculpture by the late Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica hadn’t yet opened at the time of the Foundation’s preview, but once opened will be the artists’s first outdoor sculpture constructed in Europe.

Oiticaca named the term Tropicalia, defining the late 1960s Brazilian movement across art, music, and design, and it’s present here in The Invention of Colour: Magic Square #3 (1977-79/2025). In the image here it is shown constructed in Brasil, but even in the flatter Sussex sun the work will still glow as visitors navigate it, glimpsing through its openings towards the Goodwood landscape within which it sits. A three-dimensional abstract composition, the artist’s Magic Square series – unbuilt in his lifetime – were conceived as open architectures of concrete, glass, and brickwork, navigable spaces that didn’t enclose or lead anywhere, just sat as forms of their own being without programme or answers.




A new restaurant, also designed by Studio Downie Architects, frames views into nature. In 24, the Foundation’s café, head chef Harry Cartwright works with locally-sourced produce – including some from the estate’s organic farms – to create affordable seasonal menus. The opening menu includes Goodwood lamb, New Forest asparagus, monkfish, mushroom croquettes, and a charred tenderstem broccoli that is so good it would be tempting to order a few portions of with nothing else. As visitors eat, a rich selection of works by Lubna Chowdhary, graphic drawings and ceramics complementing the plated produce.

Some sculpture parks, especially those in country estates, are vast affairs requiring long treks between curated sculptures. Goodwood doesn’t have that expanse, its 70 acres is fairly tight and meanderable in an afternoon, but it is meticulously considered, planted, and curated – not just for now but for many years to come. It will be interesting to see how the artistic visions evolve alongside the educational and horticultural, as all the ingredients of the new Foundation bed in and mature through the seasons.