If you believe looking at paintings is a three-dimensional experience, if you are drawn to the synesthetic and how one medium can bleed into another, if you like it L-O-U-D, then Peter Doig’s “House of Music” is for you.
Through Feb. 8, the Serpentine Galleries in London are hosting what is billed as the first exhibition to explore the influence of music on the oeuvre of the Scottish-born painter who has spent decades splitting his time among Trinidad, Canada and Britain. It is also the first show in which Doig, who always paints to music (country is a current favorite genre), has included a continuously playing soundtrack from the 300 albums in his vinyl collection. The show also features special guests who will play their own set of influential tracks every Sunday.
The relationship between music and the visual arts is long and varied, with some notable 20th-century pairings. In 1911, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky — who titled his wildly colorful abstractions as if they were pieces of music — wrote, “Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking!”
Inspired by the postwar New York jazz scene, Piet Mondrian painted his raucous visual jitterbug, “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” (1942-43). Jackson Pollock, as he splattered streams of paints across canvasses laid on the ground, was listening to Duke Ellington. And Faith Ringgold was likewise inspired by Duke Ellington and other Harlem greats. “Music is a life force,” she said in a 2006 interview. “I try to interpret the music in my work. You can’t see the music, but you can feel it.”
The same might be said of the vivid, luminous canvases arrayed across this four-room exhibition that Doig has titled after the lyrics of “Dat Soca Boat,” a 2011 song by the Trinidadian calypsonian musician Winston Bailey, known as Mighty Shadow.
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The post Music Influenced This Art. Now, Experience Them Together. appeared first on New York Times.
