What is coming to Serpentine Galleries in 2027

Serpentine has announced its programme for 2027, and the headline is Adrian Piper. The American conceptual artist and philosopher will have her first major solo exhibition in the UK in over 30 years, at Serpentine South from May. Alongside it, the year brings a centenary exhibition for Pierre Alechinsky, first UK institutional solos for Matt Copson and Gozo Yoshimasu, a new show from Lisa Brice, the 26th Serpentine Pavilion and a public sculpture by Cristina Iglesias in the park. 

Adrian Piper

I'm This Space: Selected Works 1967-2027 will trace six decades of Piper's work, with the selection made in close collaboration with the artist. She has worked as both a first-generation conceptual artist and an analytical philosopher, and the exhibition will take in installation, sculpture, participatory performance, video, digital imagery and drawing.

Adrian Piper, The Probable Trust Registry, The Rules of the Game #1-3, 2013 (detail). Installation and participatory group performance. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

A good number of the works ask something of the audience. Adrian Moves to Berlin (2007) is a video of Piper dancing in Alexanderplatz, with floor space left in front of the projection so you can dance with her. The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1-3(2013-27) will be staged in the UK for the first time. It invites you to sign a personal and binding contract with yourself. Piper won the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale in 2015 for that work. She was born in New York in 1948 and has lived in Berlin since 2005.

A new publication will accompany the exhibition, with two historic works on paper alongside new work made specifically for Serpentine.

26 May - 5 September 2027, Serpentine South.

Pierre Alechinsky

The year opens in February with Pierre Alechinsky, who turns 100 in 2027 and is the last surviving member of Cobra, the European avant-garde movement of the late 1940s. This will be his first major solo presentation at a UK public institution in more than six decades, which is a long time to wait for an artist of his standing.

Pierre Alechinsky, 'Central Park', 1965. Acrylic with marginal drawings in Indian ink on paper mounted on canvas, 162 x 193 cm. Photo: André Morain. © Pierre Alechinsky.

More than fifty works made between the 1960s and the 2010s will be shown, with rarely seen Indian ink drawings alongside large acrylic compositions. One device recurs throughout his work, what he calls "marginal remarks", small black-and-white vignettes that frame the main image and run as a parallel narrative, borrowed in part from comic strips and from the predella panels of medieval and Renaissance painting. His influence reaches further than his UK exhibition history suggests, from Keith Haring to Matt Copson, who has his own show at Serpentine the same year.

11 February - 18 April 2027, Serpentine South

Matt Copson

Copson, born in Oxford in 1992, will have his first major institutional solo show in the UK, and he is building it around Robin Hood. The exhibition will take the form of a labyrinth, drawing on his interest in theme park rides, with new work in laser projection, sculpture, animatronics and audio.

Matt Copson, Webbed Landscape, 2026. Medium Laser projection on UV-reactive wall. Image credit Useful Art Services.

He works across laser animation, sculpture, opera, film and performance, and there is some history here. His play without actors, A Woodland Truce, was staged in The Magazine at Serpentine North in 2016. He also co-created the opera Last Days with Oliver Leith, which premiered at the Royal Opera House in 2022, and he is currently directing a feature film adaptation of it for MUBI.

19 March - 22 August 2027, Serpentine North

The 26th Serpentine Pavilion

The architect has not been announced yet. What is known is that 2027 marks the 26th commission since Zaha Hadid designed the first in 2000, and that Serpentine has used the Pavilion in recent years to give emerging architects their first UK structure. Sumayya Vally of Counterspace remains the youngest to be commissioned. The last four went to Lina Ghotmeh, Minsuk Cho of Mass Studies, Marina Tabassum and, this year, Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo of LANZA atelier in Mexico City.

12 June - 31 October 2027, Serpentine South

Gozo Yoshimasu

Serpentine North's autumn show goes to Gozo Yoshimasu, born in Tokyo in 1939 and the first recipient of The FLAG Art Foundation Prize. He is one of Japan's most celebrated poets, and his work has long pushed past the page into performance, audio recording, painting, photography and his own moving-image form, gozoCiné.

Gozo Yoshimasu, Voix I, 2019–2021. Sumi ink, red calligraphy ink, ink, stamp ink, coloured pencil, pencil, receipt, calligraphy paper and manuscript paper, 44.5 x 44 cm. © Gozo Yoshimasu. Courtesy Take Ninagawa, Tokyo.

The exhibition will include work from Kaibutsu-kun (Dear Monster) (2012-16), a series of 600 manuscripts made in response to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, searching for what Yoshimasu calls "possible poetry" after catastrophe. His visual poems layer line drawings, handwritten inscriptions, collage and ink until the text is often partly or completely obscured. Later series Fire Embroidery (2016-18) and Voix (2016-18) will also be shown, with his archive of sound recordings, performance documentation and photography.

The jury that selected him was made up of Michelle Kuo, Venus Lau, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jon Rider and Rirkrit Tiravanija. After London, the exhibition will be reimagined for The FLAG Art Foundation in New York in spring 2028.

24 September 2027 - January 2028, Serpentine North

Lisa Brice

Brice closes the year at Serpentine South with paintings from the past five years and new work made in response to the building. Born in Cape Town in 1968 and based in London, she paints women in ways that push back against how art history has usually shown them.

Lisa Brice, Untitled, 2025. Pigment and natural water-soluble binders on linen. 5 Panels, each: 186.4 x 61.3 x 3.2 cm Overall size: 186.4 x 306 x 3.2 cm. © Lisa Brice. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison

The exhibition will be organised around four settings that recur across her work: the park, the studio, the bar and the fight arena, each one a stage for her female protagonists. Mirrors, doorways and reflections, which appear throughout her paintings, will be carried into the design of the galleries. New large-scale paintings have been made for the entrance and central gallery, extending her interest in women's self-defence, resistance and solidarity.

8 October 2027 - 6 February 2028, Serpentine South

Cristina Iglesias in the park

From spring, Serpentine and The Royal Parks will present Mineral Forest in an Irregular Pentagonal Room, 2025-27, a public sculpture by Cristina Iglesias near Serpentine South. It is a roofless open-air room built from densely textured columns that resemble organic matter, and you can walk into it.

Cristina Iglesias, Bosque Mineral, 2025. Installation view at Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera, Barcelona, 2025 © Cristina Iglesias, VEGAP, Barcelona, 2025. Photo: Pau Fabregat

The work was first shown at Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera in Barcelona and has been reconfigured for Kensington Gardens, where its outer walls pick up the brown and green of the trees around it.

Iglesias, born in Donostia-San Sebastián in 1956, represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 1986 and 1993. She has described the idea behind the work as solidifying millennia of evolution within layers of hardened matter, which puts our own time in perspective.

On view spring - autumn 2027, Kensington Gardens

Beyond the exhibitions

Serpentine's Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship continues in 2027, now with a new three-year partnership with Glass Castle that includes a contribution towards one major commission a year. The current fellows, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Alice Bucknell, Auriea Harvey and Reina Mun, were selected from close to 1,000 applicants and will present public events in the spring. The next cohort begins in September.

Formafantasma, the Milan design studio led by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, join as Lead R&D Fellows, Ecology, a multi-year appointment to work on ecological thinking across Serpentine's programme and operations. They showed Cambio, on the global timber industry, at Serpentine North in 2020.

Issue 03 of Serpentine Reader takes on the overlap between horror and comedy, with contributions from Matthew Barney, Florentina Holzinger, Kim Hyesoon, Tala Madani, Nathaniel Mellors, Julio Torres and Günseli Yalcinkaya, among others.

Still on now

Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing is on show at Serpentine South until 10 January 2027, and Amar Kanwar is on show at Serpentine North until 31 January 2027. Giuseppe Penone's Albero folgorato has been extended on the plinth opposite Serpentine South until 7 March 2027.

Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing, installation view, Serpentine South, 2026. Courtesy Serpentine. Photo: George Darrell

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