Peter Doig: Contemporary Artists (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

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Peter Doig - The Courtauld The Courtauld Lates – Peter Doig - The Courtauld

Peter Doig has been the subject of scores of exhibitions throughout his career, including a major traveling survey in 2008 at Tate Britain, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Richard Shiff is a renowned art historian and critic. Catherine Lampert is an independent curator and writer based in England.This volume is designed in close collaboration with the artist, with Doig specially creating the cover and various elements of the interior. Every facet of the painter’s singular vision is explored, from his earliest paintings of the early 1990s to the most recent series of works. 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 with Milky Way (1989-90), the motif of the girl in the canoe is borrowed from the ultimate scene of slasher movie Friday the 13th. He said: "People thought it was about the horror in the film. It was never about that. It was more about the mood - an image of a woman in a boat. Why is the woman in the boat? Why is her hand dangling in the water? It's almost as if she's fallen asleep and is in the process of waking up." 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

Peter Doig a book by Peter Doig, Richard Shiff, and Catherine

Since 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.A girl with red lips and long blond hair sits in a purple canoe, one hand trailing listlessly in the water. Pine trees on the far shore are echoed by their reflections in the still lake. The scene is placid, yet ominous.

Peter Doig, Courtauld Gallery review — modern master holds Peter Doig, Courtauld Gallery review — modern master holds

Doig’s unfinished paintings, including some for the Courtauld, follow him around the world. “Some I started in New York, others in Trinidad. Often I’d do them in distemper paint, then roll them up and post them to myself, making sure they are fumigated so termites don’t eat through the canvas stretchers. I don’t like finishing things really. I like to have things on the go. Actually, I like paintings where you can question whether they’re finished.” Many of the Cézannes at Tate Modern’s current retrospective are like that, he says. “Some look like they were taken off the easel by someone else.” 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. 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. In 2002 the Doig family - now comprising two more daughters, Eva and Alice - settled in Trinidad, inviting comparisons to painter Paul Gauguin, who moved from France to Tahiti. They had their son, August, there, and three years later Ofili moved to the island to join them.

Join us on the last Friday of the month for The Courtauld Lates, and enjoy after-hours art, cocktails, music and performances at The Courtauld Gallery.

Doig has long admired the collection of The Courtauld Gallery and in the film he considers the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists who have inspired his own painting and printmaking over the course of his career. 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. 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.