A curtain of yellow strands that visitors could step inside has become the most visited public sculpture in London. Pénétrable BBL Jaune, by the Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto, attracted 18,300 people to the Serpentine Galleries during its run, setting an attendance record for outdoor sculpture in the city. The installation was the artist's first solo presentation in Britain, staged as part of the Serpentine's summer Art in the Park programme with backing from Britannia Financial Group.

The work itself invited physical participation rather than quiet looking. Around 4,000 yellow vinyl strands hung from a steel frame ten metres long, forming a glowing maze with no doors that visitors entered and moved through. On its busiest day, as many as 4,000 people passed through the piece. Serpentine artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist said the open structure brought contemporary art closer to people who do not usually visit museums, and singled out the sight of children playing inside the work as one of the summer's pleasures.

Soto, born in Ciudad Bolívar in 1923 and based in Paris for much of his career, was a leading figure in kinetic art, building works that changed as viewers moved around and through them. Britannia, a financial group with Venezuelan roots, sponsored the London presentation, and its board member Isabela Herrera Velutini de Carmona described the project as a celebration of one of Venezuela's most important twentieth-century artists. The installation has now closed, and although nothing has been formally announced, the galleries have not ruled out a fuller Soto retrospective in London in future.

The result underlines how far the Serpentine's outdoor programme has travelled since it began placing art beyond gallery walls. A work with no entrance fee, no doors and no fixed viewpoint drew crowds on a scale more often associated with ticketed blockbusters, suggesting that the most effective audience-building device may simply be an artwork the public can walk into.