Vinyl Visions: How Peter Doig’s 'House of Music' Turns Art into Sound

March 21, 2025

Like a few others, Peter Doig is able to express the relation of sound and vision. Doig is a dreamlike landscapes painter, and a rich textures painter, and he is going to showcase his love for music in House of Music, a multi-sensory exhibition that is to be shown at London’s Serpentine Galleries in October 2025. This show promises to be more than just paintings on walls; it will be an immersive experience, an experience that will have art and music fuse to redefine the gallery as a sound and image environment.

For the audiophiles and art lovers out there, this convergence of visual and auditory art is reminiscent of the goals of A2D2 Stream. A2D2 Stream is a high-fidelity analogue-to-digital streaming device that enables users to stream their vinyl records wirelessly to any modern speaker, maintaining analogue sound and the depth, while using modern convenience.

(Scottish National Gallery, Academy Entrance - Doig Exhibition, 2013 by Brian McNeil)

A Collection of Records as a Portrait of the Artist

Doig’s interest in music is not new. In his 1998 Blizzard seventy-seven show at Whitechapel Gallery, there was an irreverent appendix: an unedited list of his personal record collection. As art critic Neal Brown pointed out at the time, Doig’s music taste is not mainstream and not at all pretentious, but rather an ‘eclectic mix of classic and left-field rock with a high percentage of indie material.’ This harmony of the sincere and the ironic is also characteristic of his paintings, where the sincere is playfully combined with the subversive and the surreal.

For House of Music, Doig is going further than his previous references to music. His record archive will be brought to life by means of a sculptural installation of restored analogue speakers. For the length of the exhibition, musicians and enthusiasts will bring these speakers to life with curated vinyl selections, making the gallery a dynamic, high-fidelity listening space. This setup will not only reflect Doig’s ecletic taste but also pay homage to the physical and warm sound that has endured through the years.

The Art of Sound: When Music and Painting Converge

Doig’s work has for a long time now has leaned towards visual language of album covers, especially from indie and psychedelic bands. His paint is applied thickly impasto, and his colours have a hallucinatory quality that places him amidst bands like Tricky, Portishead and Björk, artists who, like Doig, sit on the border of raw emotion and ironic distance. His paintings have a materiality to them that makes them seem like records in and of themselves, textured, layered, and built on a clear understanding of both nostalgia and experimentation.

This exhibition places Doig in a lineage of artists who work with sound and vision. Some other examples include:

Christian Marclay, the Swiss-American artist and composer who has used records and turntables in his art, including in his most well-known work, The Clock (2010), and Record Without a Cover (1985), which problematized the idea of permanence in music and in art.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, who worked with music and painted with it and had a rhythmic approach, using jazz and hip-hop. His collaborations with musicians and his participation in the experimental band Grey show his sound affiliation.
Kandinsky, the early twentieth century painter, who tried to paint the way one composes music, using sound to create colour and shape in works such as Composition VII (1913).
Brian Eno, who, although he is primarily a musician, has produced ambient installations of light and sound that engage the relationship between painting and sound, as Doig’s House of Music seeks to do.

Doig’s Musical Aesthetic: Sincerity vs. Irony

The sincerity vs irony is one of the most interesting aspects of Doig’s work. His paintings often conjure a yearning for bygone times and places, but they are not merely sentimental, they occupy the same ground as indie music, where the knowledge of artistry and artifice and the knowledge of cliché allows for a strangely powerful new sincerity. As Neal Brown noticed, Doig’s work looks like the work of a young person: a combination of the grandiosity of nature with pop culture and media.

This duality is carried through to House of Music. By exhibiting his record collection, Doig allows the viewer to get an insight into his private life and shows his sources and tastes when it comes to painting, making the image of the artist more realistic and understandable. It’s a personal stunt, like offering a mixtape, but it also plays into the idea that lists, particularly music lists, are how people define themselves and how they connect to subcultures and communities.

An Event Not to Be Missed

In a world of digital streaming, House of Music is a reminder of the material and ceremonial aspects of music consumption. Like paintings, vinyl records are also presented to the consumer in a more slow and deliberate manner. This exhibition isn’t just for art lovers—it’s for crate diggers, for audiophiles, and for anyone who still believes in the spell of putting the needle to the record. The restoration of analogue speakers also adds weight to this idea because it contrasts the digital audio compression of the files.

Furthermore, Doig’s decision to incorporate live musical elements, so that musicians can select and play vinyl records, means that every visit to House of Music will be different. The exhibition will become more and more diverse over the time, just like a DJ set or a never ending jam session, so that no two encounters with the work will be the same.

Doig’s capacity to combine the visual and the auditory, the retrospective and the vanguardist guarantees that House of Music will not just be be an exhibition, it will be an experience. Whether you enjoy his paintings, are into indie music, or just think that music and art should go together, this is one show that you don’t want to miss.

Final Thoughts: The Future of Art and Music Collaborations

The increasing popularity of multi-sensory art exhibitions indicates that the division between art and music will remain imprecise. Whether it’s TeamLab’s digital landscapes or Marina Abramović’s performances in collaboration with musicians such as Anohni, sound and visual art is gradually becoming the predominant mode of expression in the contemporary world. House of Music is at the head of this movement, giving a taste of what is coming - galleries turned into concert halls and paintings become playlists.

As we approach the opening of House of Music, it will be interesting to see how Doig’s choice of records, musicians and visual pieces will come together to create a truly immersive experience. As with his paintings, this exhibition has the capability to redefine how we experience music and art and what an odd but compelling way, given that, at their core, they are two different sides of the same creative coin.

For those who want to take this immersive music experience home, A2D2 Stream provides a way to rediscover the magic of vinyl in a modern, wireless world.