The new leadership of London's Serpentine Galleries have announced they are expanding the art museums’ famous pavilion programme and launching a Zaha Hadid exhibition focusing on the late architect’s design notebooks.
In their first joint press conference,
newly-appointed CEO Yana Peel and artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist announced “an exciting new chapter” in the development of the Serpentine, with a new emphasis on technology, partnerships, innovation and accessibility.
A new approach will be taken to the Serpentine Pavilion programme – in which an architect who has never built in the UK creates a temporary pavilion in Kensington Gardens. For the past 16 years, the designer tasked with the challenge was selected by Peel’s predecessor Julia Peyton-Jones.
For the 2017 commission, a group of architects have been invited to submit designs and, for the first time, the selection of the winner will be made by Peel and Obrist, together with a new advisory group that includes British architects Richard Rogers and David Adjaye.
The annual pavilion commission was first conceived in 2000 by Peyton-Jones and has since developed into an annual site for architectural experimentation. Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, Sou Fujimoto, SANAA and, most recently,
Bjarke Ingels Group are among the international architects to have previously taken part.
The Serpentine is also launching a year-long programme of exhibitions, partnering with renowned artists Lucy Raven, John Latham and Grayson Perry.
The Zaha Hadid exhibition will run from 8 December - 12 February 2017 in the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, which was designed by her practice in 2013. Jointly conceived with the architect before she died in March, it will present rarely seen paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations by the architect as well as her digital work and, for the first time, her notebooks.
Hadid’s first structure in London was the inaugural Serpentine Pavilion in 2000.
“Zaha Hadid once said that ‘there should be no end to experimentation’ and this has become a mantra for the Serpentine team,” said Peel and Obrist in a statement. “It is the reason why we continue to put artists at the core of everything we do, crossing disciplines, innovating and reaching out to new audiences."
