Justin Caguiat’s 'Change Ringing' at Serpentine

This autumn, Serpentine South will present Change Ringing, Justin Caguiat’s first UK institutional exhibition. Bringing together painting, sculpture, printmaking, sound and film, the exhibition treats the gallery not simply as a space for art, but as an active part of the work.

Caguiat’s paintings move between abstraction and figuration, organic forms and cosmic imagery, resisting fixed interpretations. At Serpentine, this sense of instability becomes physical through the use of heat-responsive pigments. Applied to copper panels, the pigments shift in colour as temperature and light change, revealing and obscuring forms. The paintings therefore never remain entirely fixed, recalling frescoes, murals and expansive landscapes while continually responding to their environment.

Alongside the paintings will be a series of bronze bells cast in the forms of flowers and plant seeds. A score by Lily Pickett draws on the logic of English change ringing, in which bells are sounded through continually changing sequences. Here, pistons trigger the bells mechanically in a continuous loop.

The sound becomes part of the architecture. Serpentine South’s walls gather and amplify the chimes, transforming the building into a listening instrument. The work recalls the concrete acoustic mirrors once constructed along Britain’s coastline to detect approaching warships, as well as Le Corbusier’s idea of architecture as an acoustic receiver.

This relationship between infrastructure, ritual and the sacred continues Caguiat’s longstanding interest in the symbolic qualities of architecture. Change Ringing follows Zodiac Machine, presented by Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Madrid earlier in 2026 across a church, market and surrounding public spaces. Conceived as a project in two parts, the exhibitions explore the relationship between sacred spaces, urban structures and everyday systems.

Caguiat’s thinking has been influenced by the Spanish architect Justo Gallego Martínez, who constructed his Catedral de Justo almost single-handedly using recycled and found materials. His extraordinary building exists somewhere between architecture, devotion, sculpture and personal mythology, echoing Caguiat’s interest in the ways structures can acquire spiritual and symbolic meaning.

At Serpentine, the bells also activate a new series of site-specific thermochromic paintings. Heating pads and microcontrollers positioned throughout the galleries respond to the chimes, heating the copper panels and causing their colours and forms to shift. Sound produces heat, heat alters colour, and the resulting changes become part of the viewer’s experience of the space.

This interplay between ancient ritual and contemporary technology runs throughout the exhibition. Bells, bronze, flowers and seeds are brought together with microcontrollers, programmed sequences and responsive pigments. Rather than resolving these contrasts, Caguiat allows them to coexist within a system defined by transformation.

Monumental paintings installed across the galleries further evoke murals, frescoes and landscapes, while a seldom-used space at the rear of the gallery will become a small cinema screening a 16mm film by Caguiat.

Time and memory are central to the exhibition. They appear in the changing surfaces of the paintings, the unfolding sequences of the bells and the movement of visitors through the building. The works do not simply occupy the gallery. They respond to it.

Change Ringing ultimately proposes an exhibition in which nothing is entirely static. Colour changes with temperature, sound travels through architecture, and programmed systems produce unexpected visual transformations. Caguiat turns Serpentine South into a living environment where painting, sculpture, technology and ritual continually affect one another.

Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing is on view at Serpentine South, London, from 8 October 2026 to 10 January 2027.