Serpentine to present House of Music, a new project by one of today’s leading British artists: Peter Doig. The exhibition marks a return to Serpentine South for Doig who first exhibited at the gallery in 1991 as a finalist in the Barclays Young Artist Award.
Accompanying Doig’s paintings with sound for the first time, the exhibition will highlight the significance of other disciplines to the artist’s practice, including music and film, alongside the importance of sites of communal gathering and creative exchange.
Envisaged as a multi-sensory environment, visitors are invited to pause and linger as they look and listen. House of Music will transform the gallery into a listening space, bringing together recent paintings by Doig and sound broadcast through two sets of rare, restored analogue speakers, originally designed for cinemas and large auditoriums. Music selected by the artist, from his substantial archive of vinyl records and cassette tapes accumulated over decades, will play through a set of ‘high fidelity’ 1950s wooden Klangfilm Euronor speakers.
“Music has often influenced my paintings. Songs can be very visual. I’m interested in what they conjure, and I’ve tried over the years to make paintings that are imagistic and atmospheric in the way music can be. Music, being an invisible art form, is open to interpretation within the mind’s eye, and reflections from the mind’s eye are often what I’m attempting to depict in my work. Many visual artists have a connection to music, whether as listeners while working or as creators. I’m excited by the idea of inviting people to share music they love, or perhaps music they’ve made themselves.”
Peter Doig
“We are pleased to present House of Music, a new project by Peter Doig. Best known for his painting, Doig’s deep engagement with music and cinema is less widely known. Building on his earlier presentation STUDIOFILMCLUB, this exhibition invites audiences to explore these facets of his practice. House of Music weaves new and recent paintings with immersive sound installations, transforming the gallery into a shared, multisensory space. At its core is a fluid exchange between disciplines, an approach integral to Serpentine’s programme. Part of our ongoing series that reveals artists through unexpected lenses, this show offers a fresh encounter with Doig’s work. We look forward to welcoming him and his collaborators as they bring the space to life with their vinyl collection.”
Bettina Korek, CEO and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine
Each painting in the exhibition engages with music in a different way: Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity P.o.S.),2010–2012, Music of the Future, 2002–2007, Maracas, 2002–2008 and Speaker/Girl, 2015, honour the different spaces and ways that music is experienced. Other works portray musicians performing (including Embah in Paris, 2017; Shadow, 2019) and people dancing or listening to music (Fall in New York (Central Park), 2002–2012; 2 Girls, 2017). Many of the works were created during Doig’s years in Trinidad (2002–21), a period that deepened his relationship with music through sound system culture and cinema. Blending personal memory, found photographs, and imagined scenes, these paintings are shaped by the wider cultural context of Trinidad.
At the centre of the exhibition is an original Western Electric / Bell Labs sound system, produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Developed to respond to the demands of modern movie sound, this extremely rare ‘loud speaking telephone’ consists of valve amplifiers and mains-energised field-coil loudspeakers, which were designed specifically to herald in the new era of ‘talking movies’. These speakers were salvaged from derelict cinemas across the UK by Laurence Passera, with whom Doig has collaborated closely on this project. Laurence Passera is a London-based expert and devoted enthusiast of cinematic sound systems. His study of ‘class A triode’ sound technology ultimately led him to the early pioneering cinematic sound systems. The speakers provide a distinctive listening experience, thanks to the technical excellence of their design, which positions them as the forebears of modern high-end audio.
Doig says:
“I invited Laurence to be part of the exhibition because of his long-running project to rescue and restore Western Electric sound systems. His labour has resulted in one of the most important systems of its kind in the world. This has been hidden away in the studio in Silvertown, only to be heard by a select few, up until now.”
On the walls that surround the sound system are three large-scale paintings depicting lions roaming freely through Port of Spain, Trinidad. They reference the Lion of Judah, a recurring figure in Rastafari imagery across mural paintings in Port of Spain, a symbol of pride, resistance, and spiritual force. Doig has returned to this motif in his work since 2015, folding it into a larger interest in collective identity and iconography.
The title House of Music, refers to lyrics of the 2011 song Dat Soca Boat by Trinidadian calypsonian musician Shadow, who Doig admires and has depicted in his paintings over the years. A portrait of the musician in his iconic skeleton suit, Shadow, 2019, is also included in the exhibition.
On Sundays, the space will be activated by Sound Service, a series of live, in-person listening sessions. Musicians and artists including Nihal El Aasar, Olukemi Lijadu, Ed Ruscha, Samuel Strang and Duval Timothy, will play a special selection of tracks from their music collections on the analogue systems.
Sound Service is imagined as an integral component of the project that aims to expand the registers of experience in House of Music, foster dialogues through the act of shared listening, and construct a sonic landscape of London. These informal residencies are intended to extend the themes of the exhibition’s ideas: sound as memory, shared listening as gathering, the speaker as both sculpture and conduit.
Sound Service evenings will invite special guests to share their selected tracks and audio samples responding to one another in new and unexpected acoustic exchanges in front of a live audience. Participants will include Dennis Bovell, Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian Eno, Andrew Hale, Linton Kwesi Johnson and more to be announced.
Peter Doig: House of Music is curated in close collaboration with the artist by Natalia Grabowska, Curator at Large, Architecture and Site-Specific Projects with Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Director of Programmes and Chief Curator, Alexa Chow, Assistant Exhibitions Curator and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director. The live programme is co-curated with Kostas Stasinopoulos.
Peter Doig: House of Music, 10th October 2025 – 8th February 2026, Serpentine South
A publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring a newly commissioned text by Michael Bracewell exploring the intersection of music and visual arts; a short history of the development of sound systems for theatres by Laurence Passera; poems by Linton Kwesi Johnson and Derek Walcott and an in-depth interview between the artist and Serpentine’s Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist. The publication will also feature reproductions of paintings alongside archival images and engineering diagrams of the speakers included in the show. Designed by the Paris-based studio Faye and Gina, this publication will echo the design of a 12-inch record cover in format.
About the artist
Peter Doig (b. 1959, Edinburgh, Scotland) grew up in Trinidad and Canada before moving to London to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art and Chelsea School of Art. Since 2002, he has divided his time between London and Trinidad where he set up a STUDIOFILMCLUB, an influential repertoire cinema club he hosted in his studio in Laventille.
Major survey exhibitions include Tate Britain, London (2008, travelled to ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2008–09); No Foreign Lands, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (2013, travelled to Musée des beauxarts de Montréal, 2014); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2014–15); National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2020); and Courtauld Gallery, London (2023). In 2023–24, he curated the exhibition Reflections of the Century at Musée d’Orsay, Paris, which placed his works in dialogue with selections from the museum’s collection. Doig taught for many years, notably at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, where he held a professorship from 2004 to 2017. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994, and in 2008 was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. Doig was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Painting in 2025.
Drawn from a young age to London subculture, Laurence Passera was immersed in both music as well fashion through assisting iconic ‘Buffalo’ stylist Ray Petri. Whilst developing his love of image and technique as a fashion photographer, he committed equally to researching ‘audio’ in what he saw was a harmonious beauty of music and machine.
His study of ‘class A triode’ sound technology ultimately led him to the early pioneering cinematic sound systems, of which he has become an authority. This in turn, inspired his extensive search and rescue mission across the UK to locate and restore these rare surviving examples of this majestic equipment.
