Privacy Policy

Jobs

About Us

Terms of Service

Peter Doig’s visionary paintings and prints transform ordinary moments from life into enthralling compositions bursting with colour. His practice is in constant conversation with his itinerant lifestyle, resulting in images with suggestive narratives that are deeply embedded in the artist’s sense of place. Doig’s works are personal reflections on his life experiences and the world that surrounds him, drawing on memories and stories to construct relatable images. 

Born in 1959 in Edinburgh, Doig’s early life was nomadic, spent across Trinidad, Canada and Britain. In 1979 Doig began his studies at Wimbledon School of Art, moving on to Central St. Martins for his BA before receiving his MA in 1990 from Chelsea College of Art. Whilst at Chelsea, Doig created what would become some of his most famous paintings, including ‘Milky Way’ (1989-90) – a superb work exemplifying his reverence for nature. Doig's highly representational style, self-described as “filmic” and infused with a sense of solitude, stood in sharp contrast to the conceptual and minimalist art that consumed his peers in London at the time. 

After Chelsea, Doig’s output during the 1990s was exceptionally fruitful. His subject was often Canadian snowscapes, turning out generative works such as ‘Blotter’ (1993), ‘Ski Jacket’, (1994) and ‘Olin MK IV’ (1995-96). In 1991 he won the Whitechapel Young Artist Award, and in 1994 he was nominated for the Turner Prize. 

In 2000, Doig won an artist residency in Trinidad and returned to the island for the first time since childhood. During this period, he resumed painting his immediate surroundings, in works like ‘Grande Rivière’ (2001-02), which depicts a place on the island where Doig stayed, and ‘100 Years Ago (Carrara)’ (2001), which shows a person in a canoe with the prison island of Carrara, just off the coast of Port of Spain, in the background.

In 2002, Doig moved his family to Trinidad permanently, initiating a new phase in his career. Following his interests during his residency, he continued to draw upon his life and experiences on the island, as well as the history and sensibility of the country in his work. As is true across his practice, Doig used found images and photographs taken by himself as aids to produce his paintings, allowing him to capture specific details and convey certain atmospheres. 

Since his move to Trinidad, Doig has worked across the world, including in New York and London, to produce images that are dream-like in quality and construction, joining real and imagined elements. The results are often ordinary and everyday scenes, such as a man walking with an umbrella in ‘Lapeyrouse Wall’ (2004) or a cricket game in ‘Paragon’ (2006), as well as somewhat fantastical visions, like a lion roaming outside the prison in Port of Spain in ‘Lion (Fire Down Below)’ (2019) or the Christ-like skier in ‘Holy Mountain’ (2021). In 2018, Doig began a series of trips to Zermatt, Switzerland, reviving his interest in snowscapes and making paintings that not only capture moments from his time in the resort town, but also feelings, observations and atmospheres.

Doig continues to produce works which functions as the recordings of an acute observer. His thoughtful reflections on the everyday produce beautiful images that beg viewers to take a second look, and reconsider what we classify as mundane. 

Peter Doig

Peter Doig’s visionary paintings and prints transform ordinary moments from life into enthralling compositions bursting with colour. His practice is in constant conversation with his itinerant lifestyle, resulting in images with suggestive narratives that are deeply embedded in the artist’s sense of place. Doig’s works are personal reflections on his life experiences and the world that surrounds him, drawing on memories and stories to construct relatable images. 

Couloir 1

Couloir 2

Lost

Road to Zermatt

Alpinist Night

Holy Mountain

Based on a selection of paintings produced during his time in Zermatt, Switzerland, Peter Doig’s ‘Zermatt’ (D1, 2022) series triumphantly marks the artist’s return to snowscapes for the first time since the 1990s. Combining the real with the imagined, the ‘Zermatt’ works depict six filmic narratives based on Doig’s experiences within the idyllic Swiss resort time and constitute the artist’s first thematic series of works.

The ‘Zermatt’ paintings were conceived in 2018 when Doig’s friend, the architect, artist and skier Heinz Julen, offered his chalet in Zermatt for Doig to stay and paint snowscapes. The paintings that make up the six prints of this series were begun just shortly after Doig’s arrival at the chalet in 2018 and were worked on during subsequent trips to Zermatt before finally being completed in London in 2021 and 2022. 

Conceptually and compositionally, Doig’s ‘Zermatt’ series was influenced by a photograph he captured of a cat outside the chalet with the Matterhorn visible in the background. The image reminded him of ski posters designed to attract people into the mountains, characterised by a delicate balance of dynamic skier and majestic, snow-covered landscape. Simple yet enticing, these images prompted Doig to produce his own series of so-called painted posters. In doing so, ‘Zermatt’ joins a lineage of poster-making by Doig, perhaps most famously those made for his Studio Film Club in Trinidad.

Relying largely on memory to construct narratives based on his time in Zermatt, Doig’s images draw upon a range of inspirations – from the town’s strong religious tradition and the danger of its landscape to memories of skiing and commuting to the slopes. His view of the resort town was undeniably influenced by Derek Walcott’s descriptions of Zermatt in his generative series of poems, ‘The Prodigal’, from 2006.

Doig’s ‘Zermatt’ joins some of his most iconic paintings, such as ‘Ski Jacket’ (1994) and ‘Olin MK IV Part 2’ (1995-96), as his newest take on alpine landscapes populated by brightly dressed skiers. As is true of these earlier paintings, in ‘Zermatt’ Doig interrogates the impact of a snow-covered environment on one’s vision. For example, the strange nature of snow is captured in the white speckles that veil ‘Road to Zermatt’, a metaphor for the brokenness of memory, while the greenish hue of ‘Couloir 2’ recalls yellow-tinted ski goggles. 

In 2022 in collaboration with HENI Editions, the six ‘Zermatt; paintings deemed by Doig to be the most 'poster-like' in size and appearance were translated into facsimile Giclée prints on Cotton Smooth Rag and framed in oak with Optium Tru Vue Acrylic Glass. His choice to do so was in part inspired by his interest in the new printing technology and its capacity to maintain the integrity of an original painting in print form, disseminating his art to a wider audience along the way. Originally conceived as a series of painted posters on paper, in the printed format the ‘Zermatt’ paintings also take on a new dimension, bringing these images into the format that inspired them, to become so-called ‘art posters’, and making Doig’s dreamlike work more widely accessible. 

Zermatt

Based on a selection of paintings produced during his time in Zermatt, Switzerland, Peter Doig’s ‘Zermatt’ (D1, 2022) series triumphantly marks the artist’s return to snowscapes for the first time since the 1990s. Combining the real with the imagined, the ‘Zermatt’ works depict six filmic narratives based on Doig’s experiences within the idyllic Swiss resort time and constitute the artist’s first thematic series of works.