Peter Doig - Artistic Practice

Artistic Practice

Many of Doig's paintings are landscapes, somewhat abstract, with a number harking back to the snowy scenes of his childhood in Canada. His landscapes are layered formally and conceptually, and draw on assorted art historical artists, including: Edvard Munch and Claude Monet to Friedrich and Klimt. His works are frequently based on found photographs (and sometimes of his own), but are not painted in a photorealist style, Doig instead using the photographs simply for reference. In a 2008 interview, Doig referred to his use of photographs and postcards as painting "by proxy" and noted that his paintings "made no attempt to reflect setting."

Doig is best known for his series of paintings of Le Corbusier’s modernist communal living apartments known as l’Unite d’Habitation located at Briety-en-Foret, in France.. The modern urban structures are partially revealed and hidden by the forest that surrounds them. As Doig explains: “When you walk through an urban environment, you take the strangeness of the architecture for granted”.

Doig's work captures moments of tranquillity, which contrast with uneasy oneiric elements. He uses unusual colour combinations and depicts scenes from unexpected angles, all contributing to give his work a magic realist feel.

In 2003, Doig started a weekly film club called StudioFilmClub in his studio together with Trinidadian artist Che Lovelace. Doig not only selects and screens the films; he also paints the poster advertising the week's film. He told an interviewer that he finds this ongoing project liberating because it's "much more immediate" than his usual work. In 2005, he was one of the artists exhibited in part 1 of The Triumph of Painting at the Saatchi Gallery in London. In 2007, a painting of Doig's, entitled White Canoe, sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist. Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles said in an interview that the sale made Doig go from being “a hero to other painters to a poster child of the excesses of the market."

In 2008, a retrospective of his work (entitled Peter Doig) was held at Tate Britain (February–May) and the Paris Museum of Modern Art (June–September)and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (October 8-January, 2009)

Doig's held his first solo exhibition since the 2008 retrospective at the Tate Britain, in September 2012 and inaugurated Michael Werner's new location, London's Mayfair. Werner writes: "Peter Doig is recognized as one of the most inventive artists painting today. Few artists of his generation have done as much to explore the evocative possibilities of paint and its capacity for depth and meaning. Doig’s unlikely palette and varied approach to the material of paint mediate lieral sources into scenes evocative of dreams or recollections. At times melancholic or contemplative, Doig’s paintings transport viewers outside the realm of normal daily experience. His exhibition at Michael Werner Gallery, London, features an entirely new group of paintings. This body of work shows the artist continuing to push the possibilities of his medium, at times returning to sources and motifs he has explored in recent years."

His work has also been said to contain ideas associated with the new epoch in art called 'Metamodernism'. This epoch marks not a departure from post-modernism, but rather an oscillation between modernism and post-modernism. Metamodernism is said to be defined by 'naivety', 'pragmatic idealism' and 'moderate fanaticism'.