a field of yellow strands in kensington gardens
Across the grass near Serpentine South, a rectangular volume of yellow lines by artist Jesús Rafael Soto now sits in the open air of Kensington Gardens, catching the movement of visitors as much as the movement of the park around it.
Entitled Pénétrable BBL Jaune (1999, 2023 Edition), the pavilion launches Serpentine’s 2026 summer program, bringing one of the Venezuelan artist’s immersive kinetic sculptures outdoors in the UK for the first time.
On view from June 16th — October 25th, 2026, the work extends Serpentine’s exhibition program beyond the gallery walls and into the landscape that has long shaped its public identity.
The sculpture arrives alongside the opening season of LANZA atelier’s 25th Serpentine Pavilion (see here) and an archive display, setting up a summer campus built around art, architecture, and live public programming.
Jesús Rafael Soto, Pénétrable BBL Jaune (1999;2023 Edition). © Jesús Rafael Soto / ADAGP, Paris 2026. courtesy Atelier Soto, Paris. photo: George Darrell. courtesy Serpentine
soto’s kinetic sculpture invites visitors inside
Born in Venezuela in 1923, Jesús Rafael Soto became a central figure in kinetic art through a practice that treated space as active, physical, and unstable. Across a seven-decade career, the artist created more than seventy Pénétrable sculptures in different sizes and colors, each composed from suspended elements that visitors could enter with their bodies.
The work installed at Serpentine is based on Pénétrable BBL Jaune, first conceived and executed by Soto in 1999 and relaunched by the artist’s estate in 2023 to mark the centenary of his birth.
Spanning ten meters in length, the sculpture is formed from 4,000 identical PVC strands hung from a rectangular steel framework, with narrow gaps between each tube creating a moiré effect that makes the vertical field flicker from a distance.
Jesús Rafael Soto, Pénétrable BBL Jaune (1999;2023 Edition). © Jesús Rafael Soto / ADAGP, Paris 2026. courtesy Atelier Soto, Paris. photo: George Darrell. courtesy Serpentine
a sculpture shaped by movement
As visitors pass through the yellow strands, the work shifts from an optical object into a bodily experience. The suspended tubes brush, part, and close again, turning each step into a small change in the sculpture’s density and rhythm.
Soto created his first Pénétrable in 1967, expanding sculpture into a situation where the viewer becomes part of the work’s movement. At Serpentine, that idea plays out in the open park, where the yellow volume sits among trees, pathways, and passing crowds, drawing people into a work that changes through contact.
‘Contrary to what we have always believed, space is not something that is filled with objects,‘ Soto explains in a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist that took place in Paris in March 2004. ‘Objects are in fact filled with space. Space flows. Nothing limits it. I’m interested in showing people who are interested in space as a quality or a universal density that in fact it is space that is in control – it defines and sets its own conditions.‘
Jesús Rafael Soto, Pénétrable BBL Jaune (1999;2023 Edition). © Jesús Rafael Soto / ADAGP, Paris 2026. courtesy Atelier Soto, Paris. photo: George Darrell. courtesy Serpentine
Jesús Rafael Soto, Pénétrable BBL Jaune (1999;2023 Edition). © Jesús Rafael Soto / ADAGP, Paris 2026. courtesy Atelier Soto, Paris. photo: George Darrell. courtesy Serpentine