Art Index: Peter Doig

Peter Doig, Camp Forestia,1996

“It's still an escape for me, painting, so it also takes me elsewhere. I don't think I would do it otherwise.”

Peter Doig

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Peter Doig, Pelican Man, 2003

Peter Doig, born April 17, 1959, is a Scottish painter and one of the most renowned living, figurative painters.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, he moved to Trinidad with his family in 1962 and later to Canada in 1966. He then began a journeyed educational career. He moved to London to study at Wimbledon School of Art in 1979. In the early 1980s, he studied at Saint Martin's School of Art, where he befriended the artist Billy Childish. To complete his studies, he attended the Chelsea School of Art, where he graduated in 1990. Shortly after his graduation, he was awarded the prestigious Whitechapel Artist Prize, which ended with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1991.

While holding a part-time job as a costume designer at the English National Opera with his friend Haydn Cottam, Doig was invited to return to Trinidad in 2000. Here, he would to take up an artist residency with his friend and fellow painter Chris Ofili.

Doig is best known for his series of paintings of Le Corbusier's modernist communal living apartments, the Unité d’Habitation located in Briey-en-Forêt, France.

In 2003, Doig and Trinidadian artist Che Lovelace started a weekly film club called StudioFilmClub in his studio.

Doig has presented major solo exhibitions at Tate Britain (2008), touring to Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt,[16] Dallas Museum of Art (2005), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2004), Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2003), and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1998). In 2013, Doig presented his first major exhibition in his home country of Scotland. The exhibition was titled No Foreign Lands and was located at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. It was critically acclaimed and displayed works created over the previous ten years, mostly during his residence in Trinidad.

In 2014, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, presented his first major exhibition in North America. A retrospective opened at Fondation Beyeler, Basel in 2014 and later travelled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark in 2015. Also in 2015, an exhibition of recent works opened at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, Italy, coinciding with the 56th Venice Biennale. Recently, his work was included in the group exhibition Cooperations at Fondation Beyeler (2017).

In the fall of 2019, the Michael Werner Gallery has hosted an exhibition of new paintings by Doig.

Peter Doig is one of the most highly rated living painters in the world. His 1999 work titled Country Rock was sold at Sotheby's London for $15 million.

AUCTION RESULTS

Peter Doig, Untitled (Speakers) from an untitled series,2013

According to Artprice.net, Doig’s turnover in 2020 was $17,454,612, with the last peak in price dated as 2017.

Some works have become iconic, including 100 Years Ago and Swamped, which both depict canoes. In 2002, Swamped reached $455,000 at Sotheby’s in London. Thirteen years later, the same work was sold for nearly $6 million (Swamped, Christie’s, New York). Between these two sales, Doig’s work triumphed at the Saatchi Gallery with The Triumph of Painting exhibition in 2005, the Tate Modern in London in 2008, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 2008, and at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in 2009. Most of his works were sold in the range of $1,000,000 to $5,000,000.