Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the Serpentine Galleries, is stepping down next July after 25 years at the helm of the former tea pavilion turned art gallery in Kensington Gardens, which she helped transform into an exhibition space for the world's leading artists and architects.
During her tenure, the original Serpentine Gallery, which was joined in 2013 by the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, has become one of London’s top contemporary art institutions thanks to an ambitious programme of free exhibitions by artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons and Marina Abramovic.
Peyton-Jones made her mark right away, organising Broken English, an exhibition of Young British Artists including Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Rachel Whiteread, in 1991. She also championed the exhibition of contemporary architecture, launching the annual summer Serpentine Commission in 2000. The inaugural pavilion was designed by Zaha Hadid, who went on to become a trustee of the gallery and convert a former gunpowder store nearby into the Serpentine’s second outpost. Other celebrated architects who have created pavilions include Oscar Niemeyer, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Peter Zumthor and Herzog and de Meuron.
Peyton-Jones praised the “incredible artists, staff and trustees” she has worked with over the years in a statement, paying special tribute to her co-director of exhibitions and programmes since 2006 and director of international projects, Hans Ulrich Obrist. She said the ethos of their double act was “to think the unthinkable” in extending the Serpentine’s international reach.
Little of this would have been possible but for Peyton-Jones’s formidable success as a fundraiser. She established an international network of supporters and made the gallery’s summer party a red-carpet affair. A defining moment in the Serpentine Gallery's history under Peyton-Jones’s leadership was the attendance of Diana, Princess of Wales, at a gala party in 1994. The late royal helped the gallery raise the £4m needed for a modernisation project completed in 1998.