Just on display, a large walk-in yellow sculpture in Kensington Gardens, titled Pénétrable BBL Jaune, made by the Venezuelan kinetic artist Jesús Rafael Soto in 1999 and relaunched in 2023 by his estate to mark the centenary of his birth. It consists of 4,000 identical yellow PVC strands suspended from a rectangular steel framework spanning ten metres. The strands hang with a slight gap between each one. From a distance, the whole thing flickers, the vertical lines producing a moiré effect that makes the work appear to move before you have moved at all. Up close, you push through it, the tubes shifting around your body, the environment changing as you change it.
It is the first time Soto’s work has been presented outdoors in the UK. The Serpentine is showing it in the vicinity of Serpentine South from 16 June to 25 October 2026, as the opening gesture of its summer programme.
Soto was born in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, in 1923. He studied at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas in Caracas before moving to Paris in 1950, where he became part of a generation of artists working through the implications of optical and kinetic perception. Alongside figures including Carlos Cruz-Diez and Victor Vasarely, he developed a practice rooted in the instability of visual experience, the way a surface or object seems to behave differently depending on where the viewer stands and how they move. He was a founding figure of what became known as kinetic art, and remained one of its most rigorous and formally inventive practitioners until he died in Paris in 2005. Over seven decades, he created more than 70 Pénétrable works in varying sizes and colours. The Pénétrable series, which began in 1967, was the point at which his interest in optical effect extended fully into three dimensions and into the body of the viewer. You were no longer looking at something that appeared to move. You were inside it.
His thinking about space was precise and counterintuitive. In a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist in Paris in 2004, he put it plainly: “Contrary to what we have always believed, space is not something that is filled with objects. Objects are, in fact, filled with space. Space flows. Nothing limits it.” That position underlies everything about the Pénétrables. The steel framework and the hanging tubes are not the work in any complete sense. The work is the spatial condition they create, and that condition exists only when someone is moving through it.
The Serpentine has been placing art in Kensington Gardens since its founding in 1970, and the outdoor programme has become a significant part of the institution’s year-round work. Soto’s piece joins Giuseppe Penone’s Albero folgorato on the plinth at Serpentine South and David Hockney’s large-scale printed mural in the garden at Serpentine North. The 2026 Pavilion, designed by the Mexican architecture studio LANZA atelier and titled a serpentine, opened on 6 June, marking the 25th edition of a programme that has become one of the more closely watched annual architectural commissions in Europe.
Pénétrable BBL Jaune runs at Serpentine, Kensington Gardens, from 16 June to 25 October 2026. Walk through it.
ALSO ON VIEW AT SERPENTINE: (Always FREE)
DAVID HOCKNEY: A YEAR IN NORMANDIE AND SOME OTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT PAINTING
Serpentine North
On view until 23 August 2026
An exhibition of new and recent works by David Hockney brings together a series of paintings created in late 2025 alongside the artist’s monumental frieze, A Year in Normandie (2020-2021), presented in London for the first time. Accompanying the exhibition, a large-scale mural by the artist is on view in the garden at Serpentine North, echoing its creation in the artist’s Normandy garden.
CECILY BROWN: PICTURE MAKING
Serpentine South
On view until 6 September 2026
Cecily Brown presents Picture Making, an exhibition featuring new and recent works by one of the most important painters working today. Marking a homecoming for the British artist who has lived and worked in New York for the past thirty years, the exhibition brings together works inspired by Serpentine’s unique location in Kensington Gardens, a site of personal significance to the artist. Themes of nature and park life have long shaped Brown’s formal explorations. For her exhibition at the Serpentine, the artist revisits familiar subjects, including amorous couples, woodland settings, and uncanny nature walks.