A sublime double-hit | Rachel Whiteread et al, at Goodwood Art Foundation

*Rachel Whiteread, Down and Up, 2024 - 2025, at Goodwood Art Foundation. Photograph by Lucy Dawkins, courtesy of the Goodwood Art Foundation*

A field in West Sussex, bordered by ancient woodland, lies fallow… but for a curious jaggedy monument. Imagine if MC Escher had redesigned a Mesopotamian ziggurat, and you’re halfway there. Anyone who stumbled upon it would be understandably perplexed. All the more so if told it was the concrete cast of staircases from a disused synagogue in Bethnal Green.

Welcome to Goodwood Art Foundation, the newly opened, state-of-the-art gallery and sculpture park just north of Chichester. The work in question is called Down and Up, and – as you might have guessed – it’s by Rachel Whiteread, the headline artist of the Foundation’s inaugural season.

Whiteread is one of three Turner Prize winners in a stellar line-up, with works by Susan Philipsz, Veronica Ryan, Rose Wylie, Amie Siegel, Lubna Chowdhary and Isamu Noguchi also on view. One of Hélio Oiticica’s colourful Magic Square sculptures, currently being installed, is soon to be unveiled.

But it is arguable that horticulturalist and landscape designer Dan Pearson, who has repurposed the 70-acre woodland site as a serene sculpture park, is the real star of the show, as I learn while being shown round by Pearson himself and art curator Ann Gallagher (formerly of the Tate).

On my last visit to Goodwood, around a decade ago, everything was rather different. For thirty years, the estate was the site of the Cass Sculpture Foundation, which closed in 2020, largely due to the financial repercussions of Brexit and Covid. The Cass venture was a pile-em-high, al-fresco gallery where almost all the newly commissioned sculptures on view had a price tag. It was enormous fun, and has been sadly missed.

The Goodwood Art Foundation nearly triples the footprint of its predecessor, and is an entirely different concept. The sculptures on view are much more sparsely dispersed in a specifically landscaped setting, a work-in-progress by Pearson, who has created a set of trails among the cherry groves, ancient woodlands, chalk quarries and wild meadows, designed to enable the ever-changing natural environment to commune with the artworks. He talks about 24 distinct micro-seasons, to encourage frequent return visits, so you can enjoy shimmering magnolias in spring, swaying cow parsley in summer, and the burnt-sugar scent of katsura leaves in autumn. And he’s not finished yet: he’s even planning to build a lake.

The site includes two indoor galleries, and visitors are invited to start their journey at the museum-grade Pavilion Gallery, an elegant, well-lit, large-windowed building currently showing two major installations by Rachel Whiteread as well as an exhibition of her largely urban photography, featuring moments of accidental beauty captured on her iPhone. Particularly poignant is Bergamo III, a trademark sculptural exploration of negative space, composed of 12 blocks of Italian marble, laid out like tombstones commemorating early victims of Covid.

*Rachel Whiteread, Pair (Untitled), 1999, at Goodwood Art Foundation. Photograph by Lucy Dawkins, courtesy of Goodwood Art Foundation*

But it’s the outdoor works on the trails outside that live longest in the memory. Take Whiteread’s Untitled (Pair), two white-painted bronze block mortuary slabs which invite you to have a lie on them (a motional memento-mori sadly discouraged by our guides). Take Isamu Noguchi’s Octectra (three-element stack), a set of bright-red geometric building blocks which wouldn’t look out of place in a children’s playground. Take Rose Wylie’s Pale Pink Pineapple/Bomb (2025), an impudent six-foot bronze sculpture, luridly painted glossy pink, incongruous in its sylvan setting, which had one of my companions muttering their disapproval. I couldn’t help but let out a chuckle: a fruit with a view?

The most powerful piece of all, to my mind, wasn’t a sculpture, but a sound installation. Susan Philipsz’s As Many As Will (2015) features four overlapping recordings of Elizabethan songs, played in counterpoint from hidden tree-top speakers, which envelop you in their eerie rhythms, a mesmerising and rather spine-chilling experience.

Britain, of course, is well-blessed with sculpture parks. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park, instituted in 1977 in West Bretton, is the 500-acre grandaddy of them all, currently showing Ai Weiwei’s haunting Iron Tree amid the Moores and Hepworths and David Nashes; the nearby Thirsk Hall Sculpture Garden, run by British Art Fair regular Willoughby Gerrish, is a more intimate counterpoint, with its Emily Youngs and Gerald Laings. You can see Barbara Hepworth works among exotic plants in St Ives; wild rabbits running past Frinks and Moores at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich; Kevin Atherton’s 15-foot stained-glass ‘Cathedral’ integrated into the woodland landscape in The Forest of Dean, and Louise Bourgeois’ scary giant spider in the Capability Brown landscape surrounding Compton Verney. Now that’s an experience

But the opening of The Goodwood Art Foundation has surely upped the ante. Calling it a ‘sculpture park’ doesn’t do the place justice: this is a space where the landscape is as considered as the works placed within it, giving the visitor a sublime double-hit of art and nature-as-art (plus the chance to mull over the experience in a tremendous café/restaurant, with an outside deck jutting into the woodland). I’ve already planned a return visit, in the autumn, when Hélio Oiticica’s Magic Square #3 will finally be unveiled… as the leaves of the oak and chestnut trees around it undergo their miraculous annual change of colour.

A sublime double-hit | Rachel Whiteread et al, at Goodwood Art Foundation

Drawn to the dark side | Edward Burra at Tate Britain