JUSTIN CAGUIAT TRANSFORMS SERPENTINE SOUTH THROUGH PAINTING, SOUND AND ARCHITECTURE
Justin Caguiat’s first UK institutional exhibition opens today at Serpentine South, bringing together new and recent paintings, sculptures, prints, sound and film in an exhibition that explores the relationship between art, architecture and the built environment.
Change Ringing has brought together painting, sculpture, printmaking, sound and film. Justin Caguiat has engaged with the gallery beyond its interiority, using the architecture and infrastructure of the Serpentine South building to frame and display his artworks.
Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing, installation view, Serpentine South, 2026. Courtesy Serpentine. Photo: George Darrell
Through a use of heat-responsive pigment, works on view at Serpentine will constantly change in colour and reveal different shapes as they react to environmental factors such as temperature and light. Though they resist fixed narratives, the paintings are reminiscent of fresco painting.
Alongside canvases, sculptures and prints, Caguiat shows a series of bronze bells cast in the shapes of various flowers and plant seeds varying in size. A score composed by Lily Pickett riffs on the logic of English change ringing, playing mechanically in a continuous loop as pistons fire in sequential code. Like the concrete acoustic mirrors built along Britain’s coastline to detect warships, or Le Corbusier’s conception of a building as an acoustic receiver, the gallery’s walls gather and amplify the bells’ chimes, transforming architecture into a listening instrument.
Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing, installation view, Serpentine South, 2026. Courtesy Serpentine. Photo: George Darrell
An evolution of Zodiac Machine (4 March - 1 April 2026; Madrid), the exhibition organised by Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid, across the Santa Ana y la Esperanza Church, the nearby Moratalaz Market, and surrounding public spaces, the Serpentine show has continued Caguiat’s longstanding exploration of the architecture, spiritual resonance, and symbolic qualities of sacred spaces, alongside the structures and rhythms of everyday urban infrastructure.
Devised as a project in two parts taking place in the two institutions, Caguiat’s new body of works was influenced by the Spanish architect Justo Gallego Martínez, specifically his Catedral de Justo, which he designed and built single-handedly using only recycled and found materials.
8 October 2026 - 10 January 2027