Peter Doig: Contemporary Artists (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

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Published to accompany Doig’s major European traveling retrospective originating at Tate Britain, this extremely satisfying and lavishly illustrated book provides a comprehensive account of the artist’s practice over two decades of extraordinary achievement. It is the most thorough overview of his work to date. With an essay by art historian Richard Shiff, an introduction by Tate curator Judith Nesbitt and an illuminating conversation between Doig and his friend, the artist Chris Ofili, this is an enlightening survey of one of the most influential painters at work today.

Peter Doig | Artnet Peter Doig | Artnet

Sponsored by Morgan Stanley and supported by Kenneth C. Griffin and the Huo Family Foundation, with additional support from the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig is the first exhibition by a contemporary artist to take place at The Courtauld since it reopened in November 2021 following its acclaimed redevelopment. In this lavish new volume devoted to his entire career-which includes paintings, drawings, and reference material, such as found photographs-art historians Richard Shiff and Catherine Lampert mine the artist’s rich and varied work. Doig’s landscapes have been inspired by the many places the artist has lived-England, Canada, Trinidad. So, too, does memory, or the idea of memory, inform much of his production. Friends get free unlimited entry to The Courtauld Gallery and exhibitions including The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig, priority booking to selected events, advance notice of art history short courses, exclusive events, discounts and more. To become a Friend, please visit courtauld.ac.uk/friends

A major exhibition of new and recent works by Peter Doig – including paintings created since the artist’s move from Trinidad to London in 2021 – is now open at The Courtauld Gallery. after newsletter promotion I don’t like finishing things. I like paintings that make you wonder if they’re finished The village of Paramin, in Trinidad’s high northern mountains, is a scattering of humble homes. Known for the peppers and thyme its farmers grow on hillside plots, the village is reachable only by vertiginous roads plied by old Land Cruisers that serve locals as communal taxis. Trinidad is an island known for its intertwined histories—it changed hands between the British, French, and Spanish, and has more than a million residents who boast roots in India or Africa or both—and Paramin is especially so. Many of the area’s people descend from slaves who fled cocoa plantations at the mountains’ feet, and older residents still speak a French Creole. Each year, during Trinidad’s famous carnival, the sons of these elders cover themselves in blue paint and fasten demons’ horns to their heads. The “blue devils” then gather at the town’s crossroads, spitting fake blood, to terrify the children of their neighbors, or of visitors from the island’s nearby capital of Port of Spain.

Peter Doig - AbeBooks Peter Doig - AbeBooks

Katharine Arnold of London auction house, Christie's, said: "In taking up archetypal images of Canada's landscape, Doig sought to distance himself from its specifics. These were not paintings of Canada in a literal sense, but rather explorations of the process of memory. For Doig, snow was not simply a souvenir of his childhood, but a conceptual device that could simulate the way our memories may be transformed and distorted over time." "Snow draws you inwards," Doig once said, which is why he so often used it as a device in his work, encouraging viewers to enter into his own remembered and filmic landscapes. What drew Doig to the musician? “Shadow was a real voice of the people. He sang about hardship, poverty, life, love. He was very different from other calypsonians. Shadow kept the catchiness while expressing things that made him vulnerable – his stage fright, his shyness. He was such a lovable figure.” In 1994, Doig had solo shows at Victoria Miro and at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, in New York, which represented Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and other rising young innovators. “Peter saw unfashionability as an asset, as a weapon,” Brown recalled recently. “At the height of the Y.B.A.s, it was clear that he would outlast them.” He was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1994 (the sculptor Antony Gormley won it that year), and a year later he was invited to be an artist-trustee of the Tate. The critical establishment, though, was not convinced. “[It’s] hard to see what all the fuss is about,” Artforum grumbled in 2000. “Doig is overstating his understatement.” When a Belgian collector said to him, “Tell me why I should buy your paintings,” Doig couldn’t think of an answer. Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre, 2000-02 In the summer, he went to Canada, where he could stay with his parents and get well-paying jobs painting houses. In 1986, he and Kennedy spent Christmas with his parents at their home in Grafton, a small town on Lake Ontario, four hours west of Montreal. Kennedy had recently lost her job in London at Bodymap, a cutting-edge fashion house that went bankrupt, and a recession in the U.K. meant that new jobs were scarce. She was offered a position with a Montreal fashion firm called Le Château, so they decided to stay. They got married that fall, in the living room of his parents’ house. For the next couple of years, they lived in Montreal. Doig found work painting sets for films—just painting at first, and then designing them. He enjoyed this, but realized that film work was all-consuming, and not what he wanted to do. Eventually, he began spending more time at his parents’ house in Grafton, where he had a painting studio in the barn. “I was quite desperately searching, making things that seemed random,” he said. The piece took six years to complete and Doig worked on it up until the moment it was delivered to the gallery. All of the artist's signature motifs are there; water, reflection, a solitary boat, snowfall, vivid color, and mysterious messages, but here the violence hinted at in previous pieces becomes more pronounced, literally foregrounded in the painting.The title referred to the process of building up color - literally soaking paint into the canvas - but also to the experience of being completely absorbed in a place or landscape. To start, Doig took a photo of his brother on ice onto which he had pumped water to create more interesting and vivid reflections. Doig was fascinated by the use of reflection in film, which is often used to represent an entrance point into another world. In this piece he reference's Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphée. Hitch Hiker” also gave him the idea of using his Canadian experience in his work. “I suddenly had a subject that I hadn’t had before,” he said. Canada had always seemed familiar and mundane to him, but now, in London, it became exciting. During his time at Chelsea, and for the next few years, Doig painted what he called “homely” suburban houses, frozen ponds, ski areas, and open fields. The houses in these early paintings look uninhabited and desolate, and you see them through a screen of trees or underbrush, or blurred by falling snow. (He went on to paint architect-designed houses—including Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Briey-en-Forêt, France, half hidden behind a screen of trees.) He was painting spaces that you had to make an effort to look into. The high prices have brought new problems. Doig paintings are so costly to insure that museums have to think twice about showing them. He’s had major exhibitions at the Tate, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Louisiana Museum, in Denmark, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, but nothing so far at MOMA, the Met, or other big museums in this country.

Peter Doig - The Courtauld Peter Doig - The Courtauld

He has long admired the collection of The Courtauld Gallery and the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists who are at its heart have been a touchstone for Doig’s own painting and printmaking over the course of his career. Visitors will be able to consider Doig’s contemporary works in the light of paintings by earlier artists in The Courtauld’s collection that are important for him, such as those by Cézanne, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Van Gogh. This mode of combining reality, memories, fictions, and images from film and photography became Doig's trademark style and marks a bold integration of postmodern pastiche and collage sensibilities with traditional painting and historical reference points. Featuring 12 paintings and 19 works on paper, the exhibition includes a group of major canvases created since the artist’s move from Trinidad to London in 2021, presenting an exciting new chapter in the career of one of the most celebrated and important painters working today. The daughter of an architect, Mogadassi met Doig when she came to work for his New York dealer, Gavin Brown, in 2010; she is now an independent curator who also works for the Michael Werner Gallery, which has exclusively represented Doig worldwide since 2012. In addition to the end of his marriage, Doig has had to cope with the recent death of his father, to whom he was very close, and with a protracted lawsuit, in which he had to prove that he had not painted a work that was attributed to him. Although the ensuing trial kept him away from his studio for months at a time, the paintings he has done in the past two years are among the most powerful and disturbing of his career. “Now, with all that trauma behind him, he’s freed up,” Mogadassi said to me. “He’s at an age when he doesn’t have anything to lose.” Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak), 2015Since relocating from Trinidad to London in 2021, Doig has set up a new studio in the city where he has been developing paintings started in Trinidad, New York and elsewhere in preparation for their unveiling at The Courtauld Gallery exhibition. In the middle of this surreal landscape a police car stands as an officer approaches the starlit lake in the foreground, his reflection visible beneath. He is peering out towards the viewer with his hands aloft as if he is shielding his eyes to see into the darkness. His mouth is open as if he is calling out. Eerie forests absorb the light, and horizontal bands of color in the middle of the piece are muddy and dark, while the greens of the trees behind are ghostly. The first Courtauld Lates on Friday 26 May 2023 is a last chance to experience our five-star exhibition of new and recent works by Peter Doig before it closes on 29 May 2023.

Peter Doig | Two Trees | The Metropolitan Museum of Art Peter Doig | Two Trees | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Doig's paintings almost always contain human figures, although they are often partly obscured, hidden, or dwarfed by their environment. He rejects the split between figurative and abstract painting, however, and uses recognizable tropes of abstract painting - such as the dot or splatter - in the service of representation or suggestion - as in his snowscapes. In the film, Doig reflects on his move to this studio and on this particularly creative period during which he has made a major new group of paintings. Doig offers insight into his work, which explores a rich variety of places, people, memories and ways of painting. The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig presents an exciting new chapter in the career of one of the most celebrated and important painters working today. It is the first exhibition by a contemporary artist to take place at The Courtauld since it reopened in November 2021 following its acclaimed redevelopment. The exhibition is presented across The Courtauld’s Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries and the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery. It is the third in The Morgan Stanley Series of temporary exhibitions at The Courtauld. As well as showing a major group of Doig’s new paintings in The Courtauld’s Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, at the same time, the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery is showcasing the artist’s work as a printmaker with a display that unveils for the first time a series of prints Doig made in response to the poetry of his friend and collaborator, the late Derek Walcott (1930-2017). For Doig, printmaking is an integral part of his artistic life: his prints and his paintings often work in dialogue with one another. By showcasing this vital aspect of his practice, visitors will be able to explore the full span of Doig’s creative process.

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That questioning surfaces in Two Trees, one of his best recent paintings. It’s another Trinidadian picture, originally commissioned by the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum to sit alongside its works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, most notably Hunters in the Snow. Like that famous scene, Doig’s painting is dominated by bare-limbed trees, but it goes way beyond the Flemish master’s vision, having been inspired by a view from his window in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. Three nocturnal figures stand before the sea, silhouetted by a setting moon like escapees from a Munch fjord. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Defiant in the face of conceptualist, multimedia, deskilling practices, Doig's paintings use specific, autobiographical moments to connect with universal emotions in a mystical and intangible way. Unlike his YBA contemporaries, such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, Doig specifically worked to make his work appear handmade, creating a space for the artist's traditional skills to flourish in British contemporary art of the time and beyond.