Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1959, Peter Doig spent his childhood and youth in Trinidad and Canada. He earned his MA from London’s Chelsea College of Art and Design in 1990 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994. Peter Doig has been based in Port of Spain (Trinidad and Tobago) since 2002. He has had solo exhibitions at leading museums around the world, including Tate Britain (London), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Scottish National Gallery (Edinburgh), Fondation Beyeler (Basel/Riehen), and Secession (Vienna). Influential among artists of his own generation and younger, Peter Doig is often referred to as the “painter of painters.”
Peter Doig’s works, composed of various paintings, seem like scenes we have seen somewhere and sometime before, and as such they serve to stimulate our imagination. Moreover, his motifs, such as canoes and human figures, appear in different colors and shapes in different works, and noting these motifs and finding connections between his works expands our imaginative horizons beyond the confines of a single painting.
His White Canoe is certainly the best known. The 1990-1991 painting, inspired by a horror film, was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in 2007 with an estimate of $1.5 million. In a bidding war, the price climbed to $11.3 million. The anonymous buyer was Boris Ivanishvili, a Russian collector whose fortune was made in ore mining and banking.
Peter Doig’s landscape depictions range from Canadian lakeshores to the seas of Trinidad and Tobago and even to the ski slopes of Niseko in Japan. He also uses movie stills as reference and has created paintings reminiscent of Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story.
Tour of the PETER DOIG exhibition with curator Ulf Küster.