Peter Doig is “probably the single most influential painter in the world today”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Born in Scotland in 1959, but resident for many years in Trinidad, he is known for blending “different styles of painting and diverse forms of imagery – from Old Master paintings and random found photographs to horror movies”. His approach to painting has been likened to a DJ mixing other people’s records to create something new. So it’s hardly surprising to learn that Doig is “obsessed with music”.
This show sees him bring his “twin passions” together, scattering a representative selection of his paintings through the rooms of the Serpentine Gallery, soundtracked by programmed highlights from the artist’s enormous record collection. Each day of the exhibition’s run, the choice of music will be different, meaning that “no two experiences of the show will be the same”. The result is an “eccentric and entrancing experience”.
The show feels “oddly like a house party where you don’t mind being sober”, said Martin Robinson in The London Standard. There’s an “immediate intimacy” to it, with “easy chairs” scattered throughout, and tables provided for visitors to sit and chat: it’s about “the communal stimulus created when art and music mix”.
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The musical set-up itself is a sight to behold, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Doig’s records – from Aretha Franklin to Kraftwerk – are played through “immense” cinema speakers, designed in the 1920s and 1930s. These objects are “sculptures in themselves, with gaping mouths of wood and metal that once boomed behind the screens of British picture houses”. They find a mirror in Doig’s painting “Maracas”, in which a vast sound system towers over a jungle scene, a tiny figure at its edge revealing its “monstrous scale”. Doig’s “eerie” paintings repeatedly evoke “misty musical dreams”: one sees an old musician plucking at a guitar; another is “a more than three-metre-wide vision of a lakeside party venue at night”, filled with “people and lights, clubhouses and umbrellas”.
It’s more of an installation than a painting exhibition, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Indeed, amid the “atmospheric feng shui” of the gallery set-up, Doig’s canvases can initially feel “incidental”. Yet eventually, they work their magic on you. Doig’s magpie approach injects old-fashioned artistic traditions with his interest in Black culture. This is particularly evident in a suite of paintings that features lions – a ubiquitous symbol in Rastafarianism – stalking past prisons in Venice and in Port of Spain. Without explicitly mentioning slavery and captivity, Doig’s paintings evoke “historical darkness”. Despite these themes, the show is “a joy to wander through”, combining music and art to create “a transportive gallery moment that feels like a Caribbean journey”.
Serpentine South Gallery, London SW7. Until 8 February
