The Art of Peter Doig
A modern painter of memories and cultural associations, with echoes of Chagall
Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Peter Doig is a painter who embraces accidents and chance encounters. “I always try to escape my mannerisms,” he said once.
Doig now lives and works in Trinidad in the Caribbean where he also spent some of his childhood. Memory and association play a large role in his work, as he moves between motifs of popular culture and references of local Trinidadian culture.
With Peter Doig — who recently displayed new paintings at the Michael Werner Gallery, London — corrosion is paramount. His paintings seek to overturn themselves from within, alluding to altered states, to dreams and hallucinations. His paint has become increasingly loose, curdled, and his lurid colour palette is intentionally sour. This is a vinegary type of beauty.
An artist from the Gerhard-Richter-school of found-imagery, using newspaper cuttings and film stills, Doig has drawn from such sources as Friday the 13th and Japanese ski brochures as the basis for his paintings. Yet so reworked are his sources that the originals become suppressed in a vision that skates a fine line between figuration and abstraction. The result is a murky narrative rooted in ambivalence. The human points of contact — solitary figures on…
