ART CITIES: London-Peter Doig – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

Peter Doig is a Scottish painter celebrated for his dreamlike, atmospheric works that blend memory, landscape, and imagination. Raised in Trinidad and Canada, he studied in London and gained fame in the 1990s. His paintings often evoke isolation and nostalgia, featuring snowy scenes or tropical settings. Doig’s expressive, layered style connects contemporary art with painterly traditions.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Serpentine Gallery Archive

“House of Music” is a new and immersive project by Peter Doig that investigates the intersections of painting, sound, and collective experience. The exhibition explores how music, film, and sites of gathering shape the artist’s visual language, while inviting visitors to listen as much as to look. Envisioned as a multisensory environment, House of Music transforms the gallery into a place of resonance—where the act of viewing becomes entwined with the act of hearing. At its core, the exhibition examines how music structures memory, atmosphere, and social connection within Doig’s practice. The gallery space hums with the warmth of analogue sound, broadcast through two sets of rare, restored speakers originally designed for cinemas and large auditoriums. Music selected by the artist—from his extensive archive of vinyl records and cassette tapes collected over decades—plays through 1950s wooden Klangfilm Euronor speakers, once the pinnacle of high-fidelity engineering. These sounds do not merely accompany the paintings; they infuse them with a sensorial charge, a rhythm that blurs the boundary between image and soundscape. Each of Doig’s paintings engages with music in a different register. “Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity P.o.S.)” (2010–2012), “Music of the Future” (2002–2007), “Maracas” (2002–2008), and “Speaker/Gir”l (2015) explore the physical and emotional spaces of listening—the intimacy of solitude, the spectacle of performance, the communal pulse of the dance floor. Works such as “Embah in Paris” (2017), “Shadow” (2019), “Fall in New York (Central Park)” (2002–2012), and “2 Girls” (2017) capture musicians, dancers, and listeners in moments of suspended motion, where sound becomes visible through gesture and color. Many of these works trace their origins to Doig’s two decades in Trinidad (2002–2021), a period that deepened his engagement with music through exposure to sound system culture, calypso, and open-air cinema. In Trinidad, sound is inseparable from place—blurring the boundaries between private and public, between street and performance. Doig’s paintings from this time are marked by that porousness: they blend memory, found photography, and imagination into dreamlike compositions that feel both deeply personal and collectively resonant. At the centre of “House of Music” stands a remarkable Western Electric / Bell Labs sound system from the late 1920s and early 1930s—one of the earliest “talking movie” technologies. Comprising valve amplifiers and field-coil loudspeakers, these systems were designed to project the new era of synchronized sound to cinema audiences. The example featured here was salvaged and restored by Laurence Passera, a London-based expert in early cinematic audio. Doig’s collaboration with Passera brings the system out of obscurity—reviving a forgotten object of industrial design and repositioning it as both sculpture and instrument. Doig said: “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. Until now, it’s been hidden away in his Silvertown studio, heard only by a select few.”

Around this monumental sound system hang three large-scale paintings of lions roaming through Port of Spain, Trinidad. These works allude to the Lion of Judah, a recurring emblem in Rastafarian mural art symbolizing pride, resistance, and spiritual power. Doig’s continued engagement with this motif since 2015 reflects his broader interest in collective identity and the iconographies that bind communities together. The title “House of Music” takes inspiration from “Dat Soca Boat” (2011), a song by the Trinidadian calypsonian Shadow—an artist Doig has long admired and depicted. A portrait of Shadow in his iconic skeleton costume (Shadow, 2019) appears within the exhibition, honouring both his music and his mythic stage persona. On Sundays, the exhibition expands into performance through “Sound Service, a series of live listening sessions that activate the gallery as a space of exchange. Musicians and artists—including Nihal El Aasar, Olukemi Lijadu, Ed Ruscha, Samuel Strang, and Duval Timothy—select and play music from their own collections through the analogue systems. These sessions extend Doig’s ideas of listening as community practice, turning the exhibition into a living archive of sound. Future “Sound Service” evenings will feature special guests such as Dennis Bovell, Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian Eno, Andrew Hale, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Each participant will respond to others’ selections in a form of acoustic dialogue, layering the space with new rhythms and perspectives. Through this interplay of painting, music, and sound technology, “House of Music” proposes the gallery as both a house and an instrument—a site where listening becomes an act of memory, gathering, and imagination. Doig’s paintings, like the analogue systems that accompany them, remind us that art and sound share a common pulse: both are ways of inhabiting time, of giving form to the unseen vibrations that connect us.

Info: Curators: Natalia Grabowska, Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Alexa Chow and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director. Live Programme Co-curator: Kostas Stasinopoulos, Serpentine Gallery, Serpentine South, Kensington Gardens, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 10/9/2025-8/2/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.serpentinegalleries.org/