Summer is the ideal season to enjoy the outdoors and explore the various outdoor sculpture parks throughout the UK. In contemporary art, sculpture parks have become unique spaces where creativity and nature blend together. Stately Homes like Houghton Hall, Wolterton, and Castle Howard have created sculpture parks in the grounds. Artlyst has selected six for you to visit this summer.
Henry Moore, Kew Gardens
Henry Moore: Monumental Nature
Kew Gardens, London
9 May 2026 to 31 January 2027
Kew Gardens in London will showcase a once-in-a-generation presentation of artworks by Henry Moore, one of the most influential and internationally recognised artists of the 20th century. Monumental Nature represents the largest and most comprehensive showcase of Moore’s work to date, featuring 30 works across Kew’s varied landscape and inside the iconic Temperate House, the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world.
Adult: £27.50
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Lynn Chadwick, Houghton Hall, Norfolk
Lynn Chadwick at Houghton Hall, Norfolk
2 May 2026 – 4 October 2026
Houghton Hall will present a major exhibition of sculpture by the celebrated post-war British artist Lynn Chadwick CBE (1914–2003). Spanning four decades of the artist’s career, from the 1950s to the 1990s, this new presentation will showcase previously unseen and rarely exhibited works alongside his best-known sculptures across the house and grounds of Houghton Hall. It will form the largest exhibition of Chadwick’s work in the UK in more than two decades, following the artist’s death and the retrospective at Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2003.
Curated by Pangolin London, the exhibition will present 30 works across multiple exterior and interior sites at Houghton Hall, including early works, a powerful group of dynamic beasts, kinetic sculptures, and a selection of Chadwick’s best-known paired figures (‘couples’), all set in dialogue with the Neo-Palladian architecture and extensive parklands of Houghton Hall.
£22
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Read Miranda Carroll’s review Here
Installation View, Nancy Holt, Ventilation Systems at Goodwood Art Foundation. Photo credit: Ciaran McCrickard, PA Media Assignments
Goodwood Art Foundation, Chichester
Nancy Hoult, Eva Rotschild and Art in the Landscape
2 May – 1 November 2026
The Summer programme at Goodwood Art Foundation features works by international artists Polly Apfelbaum (US), Nancy Holt (US), Lee Ufan (South Korea), Yayoi Kusama (Japan) and Eva Rothschild (Ireland).
The programme brings together over 50 works, encompassing sculpture, installation, ceramics, textiles, photography, film, prints and drawings, displayed within the Foundation’s two galleries and restaurant, 24, and across its 70-acre landscape.
MoonSunStarEarthSkyWater is the first major UK exhibition dedicated to the celebrated American artist Nancy Holt (1938–2014). Holt’s practice spanned more than four decades and explored human experience in relation to cosmic and natural systems. Major new iterations of her influential site-responsive installations are realised according to the artist’s instructions, in collaboration with Holt/Smithson Foundation, extending beyond the walls of the gallery space into the surrounding landscape.
Irish artist Eva Rothschild (b. 1971) has unveiled an important new commission, a large-scale tapestry woven locally at West Dean College’s Tapestry Studio, in the Foundation’s Pigott Gallery. Sculptures by the artist feature both within the gallery and across the landscape, demonstrating the breadth of her visual language using a wide range of materials in a series of signature colours.
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Phyllida Barlow, untitled: mantlestacked; 2020, 2020, plywood, timber, plaster, sand cement scrim, steel, paint, PVA,
© Phyllida Barlow Estate. Courtesy the Phyllida Barlow Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography, Pete Braithwaite
Dame Phyllida Barlow and Daisy Parris
Wolterton, Norfolk,
20 May – 31 October 2026
Wolterton presents two major exhibitions of work by Phyllida Barlow and Daisy Parris as part of its 2026 Art & Culture programme, conceived by Artistic Director and Lead Curator, Simon Oldfield. Installed throughout the Hall’s historic interiors and surrounding grounds, the exhibitions set two distinct contemporary practices against one of Britain’s most assured Palladian houses.
Phyllida Barlow: disruptor is a solo exhibition curated by Guest Curator Clare Lilley in collaboration with Simon Oldfield. the exhibition unfolds across three rooms at Wolterton and into the landscape beyond. disruptor brings together more than 70 works spanning over five decades of the artist’s career, from works on paper to large-scale sculptural installations.
Running concurrently, Daisy Parris will present Fist Full of Dreams, a solo exhibition curated by Guest Curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley and Simon Oldfield in a newly developed ground-floor gallery at Wolterton. Bringing together a new body of paintings made in response to the house and landscape alongside the artist’s first large-scale textile installation, the exhibition establishes a dialogue with Phyllida Barlow’s sculptural interventions elsewhere in the building.
Tickets are free for the exhibition and entrance to Wolterton, but must be booked in advanced. Please select a date and the number of tickets
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Library of the Four Winds, Castle Howard
Es Devlin: Library of the Four Winds – part of Vanbrugh 300
Castle Howard
13th June – 27th September 2026
Britain’s most famous country house, recognised by millions from Brideshead Revisited and Bridgerton, celebrates its architect Sir John Vanbrugh with the opening of a major installation by artist and designer Es Devlin.
Library of the Four Winds is a new sculpture by internationally renowned artist and designer Es Devlin in response to Vanbrugh that will take over the Temple of the Four Winds and is part of the National Year of Reading. The artwork honours the Year of Reading, and is designed as a place where everyone is invited to sit, read and relax.
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Joana Vasconcelos, Gateway, Jupiter Artland
Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh
Jupiter Artland, outside Edinburgh, is an award-winning contemporary sculpture park set in 120 acres of meadow and woodland. Jupiter Artland boasts a remarkable collection of permanent installations by renowned artists, including Andy Goldsworthy, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tracey Emin, Phyllida Barlow, Antony Gormley, and Marc Quinn. Each piece is thoughtfully integrated into the natural surroundings. Gateway by Joana Vasconcelos is a sculpted swimming pool adorned with 11,500 handcrafted Portuguese tiles.
Current exhibitions are:
Tai Shani: The Spell or The Dream until September 2026. Turner Prize-winning, Somerset House Studios artist Tai Shani presents: The Spell or The Dream. A new work for the landscape, The Spell or The Dream is a multi-faceted work inviting audiences to collectively dream of new horizons.
Extraction until 26 July explores how energy systems shape culture, land and belief, through work by artists Carol Rhodes, John Gerrard, Marguerite Humeau, Siobhan McLaughlin and John Latham. Their practices are set in dialogue with Jupiter’s layered landscape, where traces of the shale gas industry, the North Sea petroleum economy, and contemporary renewables are simultaneously visible.
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