Peter Doig: Contemporary Artists (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

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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. 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 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. 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.

Peter Doig - Rizzoli New York

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.

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.

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. 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. This piece was begun during Doig's final year at Chelsea School of Art and would come to represent the beginning of the snow scene motif that would dominate much of his art.

Peter Doig - The Courtauld Peter Doig - The Courtauld

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Nicholas Serota, Chair of Arts Council England, said Doig's paintings "have a kind of mythic quality that's both ancient and very, very modern. They seem to capture a contemporary sense of anxiety and melancholy and uncertainty. Lately, he's gone more toward the sort of darkness we associate with Goya." This is evident here. The piece is menacing, asking more questions than it answers. Again we see the reflection motif, bringing up thoughts of drowning in the unknown. The low vantage point suggests we, the viewer, are in the lake, perhaps floating in one of Doig's famed canoes. We are far enough away to be unable to hear the officer's shouts of warning or rescue. Doig was always looking to produce "an image that is not about a reality, but one that is somehow in between the actuality of the scene and something that is in your head". By positioning us, the viewer, as the "screamer" in his own painting, Doig again centralizes an embodied, emotive experience of his work, an ideal that had long been absent in discussing important aspects of contemporary art's relationship to its audience.

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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.

Peter Doig - ARTBOOK|D.A.P. Peter Doig - ARTBOOK|D.A.P.

The snowflakes are both figurative and abstract, and play with mark-making techniques to show how a painter might think about both snow (descriptively) and the colored dots of an abstract composition (formally). The complex, yet whimsical, relationship between form, brushwork, and content in this work is an important moment in contemporary painting. 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 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. 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 I wanted to be somewhere different,” Doig told me. “It was mostly for my work, but I also felt that Trinidad had affected my life, and I wanted the children to have that experience.” Lapeyrouse Wall, 2004

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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. Unwind after work and explore masterpieces from The Courtauld’s world-renowned art collection, such as Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Other highlights include our 20th Century British Art display, the Bloomsbury Room and the magnificent Blavatnik Fine Rooms.

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

We are excited to unveil this new exhibition of works by Peter Doig, the first since his return to London. The Courtauld’s great Impressionist collection is a touchstone for many artists. It offers the perfect context to experience how Doig’s work resonates strongly with the art of the past whilst charting new directions. We are grateful to Morgan Stanley, Kenneth C. Griffin, the Huo Family Foundation and the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne for the generous support that has made this important exhibition possible.’ I’m coughing all the time because of the fumes,” he says. Paint fumes have long been an occupational hazard: Doig’s sinuses are often clogged thanks to the thinners he uses, but working with the studio windows closed during a London winter makes matters worse. “It’s not,” he says, “a very healthy way to go about living.” This painting is about being complicit, being involved in something terrible’ … Two Trees, from 2017. Photograph: Peter Doig/Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

The exhibition is sponsored by Morgan Stanley. Supported by Kenneth C. Griffin and the Huo Family Foundation, with additional support from the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.