Installation view of Peter Doig: House of Music @ Serpentine South, showing the first thing you see, the big painting in the entrance hall titled ‘Painting for Wall Painters’ (2010 to 2012) (photo by the author)
Sounds
This is an interesting experiment in the impact of music on people’s perception of art.
Serpentine South is displaying 20 or so paintings by contemporary British artist Peter Doig but the real point of the exhibition is the music that dominates the show. The music is sourced from Doig’s own extensive collection of Black reggae, dub and rare groove tracks, along with a wide range of modern jazz, and is played live from collectible old LPs on a genuine record player.
This all makes a nice change from the intimidatingly cathedral-like silence of most art galleries, and encourages you to talk at almost normal room level. When we walked in the DJ was playing a long chilled dub track which sounded like this and immediately had my three lady friends bobbing and swaying like saplings in a breeze.
Old speakers
But the real stars of the show are the two ‘high fidelity’ 1950s wooden Klangfilm Euronor speakers salvaged from cinemas, one in each of the side galleries, and – in the gallery’s big central space – a huge scaffold containing speakers and the DJ along with his desk and turntables. The huge scaffold makes it feel like you’re at a festival, while the beautifully curved and shaped wooden cinema speakers in the side galleries are accompanied by a set of old cinema seats (in one, darkened, room) and wooden tables and chairs (in the other, light, room) i.e. encouraging you to take the weight off your pins and chill.
Installation view of Peter Doig: House of Music @ Serpentine South, showing the 1950s wooden Klangfilm Euronor speaker in the ‘light room’ (photo by the author)
Laurence Passera
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, who Doig has collaborated closely with on this project.
Installation view of Peter Doig: House of Music @ Serpentine South, showing the big sound system, huge speakers, DJ setup, and a young Peter Doig fan (photo by the author)
Passera is a London-based expert and devoted enthusiast of cinematic sound systems. The speakers offer a unique listening experience due to the technical mastery achieved in their construction that places them as the great grandfathers of modern ‘hi-end’ audio.
Chill
The whole setup is designed to make you sit and chill and relax and worked very well for me and my three friends who had trekked miles across Kensington Gardens to get here and really enjoyed the opportunity to have a sit down and a cheeky nibble of the snacks we’d brought with us.
The art
Oh yes, the artworks. Well, a lot is explained when you learn that Peter Doig, although born in Edinburgh (in 1959) grew up in Trinidad (and then Canada) before moving to London to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art and Chelsea School of Art. But it’s the Caribbean which has his heart and since 2002, he’s divided his time between London and Trinidad where he set up a studiofilmclub, an influential repertoire cinema club he hosts in his studio in Laventille. This Caribbean upbringing explains the nice and easy dub reggae sounds but only partly the paintings.
Installation view of Peter Doig: House of Music @ Serpentine South (photo by the author)
Broadly speaking the paintings can be divided into two groups: big urban landscapes or studies of individual people. The urban landscapes (see example above) are reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico in featuring a strong sense of perspective and being empty of people, and so abandoned and eerie. But whereas de Chirico paints with hard defined edges and strict shadows, Doig’s approach is always more blurred and handmade.
There are more portraits of people and they are more diverse but I found all of them a bit worrying. He is not interested in photographic accuracy and some of the figures are so blurred and smudged as to appear somehow damaged.
Installation view of Peter Doig: House of Music @ Serpentine South showing ‘Maracas’ (2002) (photo by the author)
All the writing about his painting, and Doig’s own interviews, all emphasise the sunny laid-back atmosphere of the Caribbean so I wondered if there was something wrong with me that I saw so many of the figures as suffering from some kind of damage. They looked like survivors from a nuclear apocalypse. Is this an image of carefree hedonism, or something really troubled and disturbed?
Installation view of Peter Doig: House of Music @ Serpentine South (photo by the author)
This is one of the three of the works on show which were painted specifically for the exhibition and come straight from the artist’s studio, as a visitor assistant proudly told me. It looked to me like a terrible disaster had taken place, volcanic or radioactive fragments falling from the sky to burn alive white and black alike.
Is it just me who finds these images relentlessly negative and alarming? The commentary tells us about his obsession with music which spills over into portraits of the kind of itinerant local musicians, sometimes calypso singers, you get in the Caribbean. All that sounds lovely until you actually see a Doig picture of one.
Installation view of Peter Doig: House of Music @ Serpentine South showing ‘Shadow’ (2019) (photo by the author)
The lighthouse is nice but why can you see the guy’s rib cage? It looks like an X-ray which is what set me thinking about some kind of nuclear catastrophe.
This would explain the painful postures and burned blackness of many of the images, and also explains why the urban cityscapes are devoid of human life. Everyone’s been incinerated. The painting below is called ‘Fall in New York’, but does it look like autumn in Central Park with the leaves on the trees turning wonderful shades of brown and orange and yellow? No.
Installation view of Peter Doig: House of Music @ Serpentine South showing ‘Fall in New York’ (2002 to 2012) (photo by the author)
If you really study it, maybe those oval shapes in the background are leaves, and I can see the roller skates on her feet, but does this painting convey joyful exuberance? Skating through the park on a sunny autumn day? No. To me it has the existential black dread of a Francis Bacon painting.
Musical effects
Or, maybe something else was going on in the way I perceived these paintings. Remember I kicked off by suggesting that this is ‘an interesting experiment in the impact of music on people’s perception of art’? Well, when I happened by chance to go into the naturally lit side gallery and then into the big bright central space, the DJ happened to be playing a very chilled dub track which made me smile and tap my toes and generally feel happy with the world.
But then, as I walked into the dark side gallery, a new track started playing, much more challenging music, free jazz by Pharaoh Sanders from his 1973 ‘Village of the Pharaohs’ LP.
Play it for a minute or two and you’ll see what I mean by ‘challenging’ or ‘difficult’. After a few minutes you start to get a headache and this is the point I’m making – maybe my response to Peter Doig’s open-ended, blurred and troubling images was more influenced by the music I was hearing than I realised.
Maybe I found the initial images I saw light and sunny as (I think) he intends them to be, largely because I was listening to light and sunny music – whereas the more confrontational and cacophonic Sanders track dragged me down into more of a negative mood than I consciously realised as I went into the darkened room with the nuclear holocaust images.
Maybe it’s because music’s influence is so swamping and so powerfully affects our mood and responses to visual stimuli, to paintings and artworks, that galleries are so routinely squeaky clean and super silent. It’s because any kind of pulse, beat, rhythm or melody immediately affects us, alters our perceptions and interferes with whatever the artist intended.
Well, that’s what this experiment with music and painting suggested to me…
Lions
The visitor assistants at the Serpentine galleries are among the most friendly and well informed anywhere in London. I had a chat with the DJ about the tracklist he was playing (it varies every day), and then asked another one about the ubiquity of lions in the paintings. Why so many lions, especially in the really big works in the central room?
Installation view of Peter Doig: House of Music @ Serpentine South showing ‘Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak)’ (2015) (photo by the author)
She didn’t know for absolute certain but between us we came up with three or four theories.
1. Rasta The Lion of Judah is a central symbol in the Rastafari movement, representing Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, whom Rastas revere as the returned messiah and King of Kings, linking him to the biblical lineage of King David and the tribe of Judah. It symbolizes strength, royalty, African sovereignty, and resistance to oppression, with dreadlocks often likened to the lion’s mane, embodying pride, independence, and spiritual power against injustice.
2. Satire on Britain It can also be seen as a re-appropriation of the British Royal coat of arms which traditionally features a lion and a unicorn representing the British Empire. Maybe the lions in Peter Doig’s paintings are post-imperial lions.
3. Lazy lions The assistant smiled when she pointed out that they’re all male lions and that male lions have the reputation of lazing around doing nothing while the female lions do all the hard work of hunting and rearing the young. I think she was making an amused feminist point but it shaded onto the longstanding and probably racist stereotype of Black men not always paying punctilious attention to family responsibilities, the kind of issue I read about regularly in The Voice when I lived in Brixton in the 1980s. But that’s the trouble with dabbling in symbols – they don’t necessarily stop where you want them to.
4. Liberated lions Now, a few days after visiting and with the time and leisure to read the big free exhibition handout, I learn that the lions in Doig’s paintings are references to the Lion of Judah – but also symbols of liberation in the simple sense that lions are normally caged in a zoo but these ones have been freed to (rather dangerously) roam the streets. Just as well, then, that the streets are eerily empty of human beings.
5. Port of Spain prison There’s an extra level of symbolism which is that in a painting like ‘Rain in the Port of Spain’, the lion is placed against yellow walls which clearly reference the prison in Port of Spain’s city centre. When you learn that this is sometimes called the Royal Gaol, then you realise the lion is a really complex symbol, indicating pride and freedom over colonial rule and incarceration, vivid orange virility compared with the washed-out streets, a kind of aliveness and thereness, and lots more…
House of Music
The exhibition title ‘House of Music’ refers to lyrics of the song ‘Dat Soca Boat’ by Trinidadian calypsonian musician Shadow, who Doig admires and has depicted in his paintings over the years. The exhibition includes ‘Shadow, 2019’, a portrait of the musician in his iconic skeleton suit. Ah. OK. That explains the X-ray image of the rib cage. But I read this fact too late to dislodge the essentially negative, worried initial response I had to the image.
Sound Service evenings
On Sundays, the space has been hosting sessions by Sound Service, a series of live listening sessions. Musicians, artists and collectors – including Nihal El Aasar, Olukemi Lijadu, Ed Ruscha, Samuel Strang and Duval Timothy – share selections from their collections on the analogue systems. During the show’s run, these sessions have featured 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 have included Lizzi Bougatsos, Dennis Bovell, the egregious Brian Eno and the fabulous Linton Kwesi Johnson, plus more.
Thoughts
I loved the big cinema speakers, and enjoyed (most of) the music, and I registered the fact the Doig has a strong and distinctive painting style, with a recurring set of images (the lions, representations of big speaker systems, walls of flags – as in the image at the top of the review). But I’m not sure I really liked any of them.
Speakers or painting? For me, speakers every time. Installation view of Peter Doig: House of Music @ Serpentine South (photo by the author)
Related links
- Peter Doig: House of Music continues at Serpentine South until 8 February 2026
- A Peter Doig playlist on Spotify
- Peter Doig on Desert Island Discs
- Financial Times review
Books & Boots 