Justin Caguiat takes Serpentine South from 8 October 2026 to 10 January 2027 for his first UK institutional exhibition. Free.
Justin Caguiat was born in Tokyo in 1989 and paints very large, on unstretched canvas or linen that hangs loose and runs the length of a wall. The pictures are dense and half-legible: figures dissolving into pattern, colour laid on in washes that read at a distance as stained glass and up close as almost nothing — and they have made him one of the most closely watched painters of his generation without his having had a British institutional show.
Change Ringing is that show, and it does not stay with the paintings. It runs across sculpture, printmaking, sound and film, and it follows a project he made last year inside a church in Madrid built single-handed, over decades, out of salvage by a former monk. What he took from that is the subject here: how a building accumulates memory, ritual and the marks of being changed.
It occupies Serpentine South from Thursday 8 October 2026 to Sunday 10 January 2027, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Natalia Grabowska. Admission is free and there is no booked ticket. It opens in Frieze week, when everything in London is competing for the same four days, and stays up through Christmas — which makes it one of the few October shows still there in January. Change ringing is the English art of ringing tower bells in permutations.