Peter Doig: House of Music
Serpentine, London
10 October 2025 – 8 February 2026
Maracas, 2002-2008
Oil on canvas, 290 x 190 cm
© Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved
Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity P.o.S.), 2010–2012
Distemper on linen, 240 x 360 cm
© Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved
Fall in New York (Central Park), 2002–2012
Oil on linen, 120.5 x 98 cm
© Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved
Serpentine presents 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 Peter 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.
Peter Doig said: “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.”Bettina Korek, CEO and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine said: “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.”
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 Peter 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. Peter 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 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.
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.
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.
SERPENTINE GALLERIES, LONDON