Peter Doig: House of Music review – intoxicating paintings with a banging soundtrack

Serpentine Gallery, London
Pairing his fantastic landscapes with a soundtrack blasted on vintage sound systems, the painter blurs the lines between club and gallery to seismic effect

A giant sound system towers against green mountains in Peter Doig’s painting Maracas, while a tiny man stands on a speaker-stack to reveal the monstrous scale. It’s a utopian – or dystopian – daydream of what sound can be. Could the speakers broadcast enough sonic power, enough soul and love, to blast away reality? They are silent, of course; the mystery, the dread, lies in the expectancy.

Not any longer. House of Music, Peter Doig’s new exhibition, or club, or festival, turns this painting hanging in the Serpentine’s vestibule-like introductory space into a manifesto, and turns up the volume.

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