One of his generation of painters most closely watched by other artists, Justin Caguiat gets his first UK institutional show at Serpentine South, to 10 January 2027.
Justin Caguiat has his first UK institutional show, Change Ringing, at Serpentine South Gallery in Kensington Gardens from Thursday 8 October 2026 to Sunday 10 January 2027. It opened in Frieze week.
Caguiat was born in Tokyo in 1989. He paints very large, on unstretched canvas or linen that hangs loose and runs the length of a wall. Figures dissolve into pattern, and washes of colour read at a distance as stained glass.
He has shown in London, New York and Tokyo, and his work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, MOCA Los Angeles and SFMOMA.
The show follows Zodiac Machine, a project he made last year inside a church in Madrid. A former monk, Justo Gallego Martínez, built it single-handedly over decades out of salvage. Its subject carries over: how a building gathers memory, ritual and the traces of being changed.
Thermochromic paintings shift with the room’s heat and light, beside bronze bells cast as flowers and seed pods. Change ringing is the English art of ringing tower bells in fixed permutations, never a tune.
Hans Ulrich Obrist curates the show with Natalia Grabowska, and the bells ring to a score by Lily Pickett.