I switched build back to "Use Gradle Wrapper" in "Invoke Gradle script" configuration from a previously manually defined Gradle.
This may be related to master/slave configuration, i.e. I think that the problem exists because the changed Gradle plugin configuration can't be synced to the slave.

FATAL: Unable to serialize hudson.plugins.gradle.GradleInstallation$2@100e3d5
java.io.IOException: Unable to serialize hudson.plugins.gradle.GradleInstallation$2@100e3d5
at hudson.remoting.UserRequest.serialize(UserRequest.java:166)
at hudson.remoting.UserRequest.<init>(UserRequest.java:62)
at hudson.remoting.Channel.call(Channel.java:642)
at hudson.plugins.gradle.GradleInstallation.getWrapperExecutable(GradleInstallation.java:72)
at hudson.plugins.gradle.Gradle.perform(Gradle.java:154)
at hudson.tasks.BuildStepMonitor$1.perform(BuildStepMonitor.java:19)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractRunner.perform(AbstractBuild.java:649)
at hudson.model.Build$RunnerImpl.build(Build.java:177)
at hudson.model.Build$RunnerImpl.doRun(Build.java:139)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractRunner.run(AbstractBuild.java:423)
at hudson.model.Run.run(Run.java:1362)
at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:46)
at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:88)
at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:145)
Caused by: java.io.NotSerializableException: hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild
at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.writeObject0(ObjectOutputStream.java:1156)
at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.defaultWriteFields(ObjectOutputStream.java:1509)
at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.writeSerialData(ObjectOutputStream.java:1474)
at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.writeOrdinaryObject(ObjectOutputStream.java:1392)
at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.writeObject0(ObjectOutputStream.java:1150)
at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.writeObject(ObjectOutputStream.java:326)
at hudson.remoting.UserRequest._serialize(UserRequest.java:155)
at hudson.remoting.UserRequest.serialize(UserRequest.java:164)
... 13 more