Peter Doig

by Richard Shiff (contributor), Ulf Küster (Editor), Peter Doig (Artist)

The works of the painter Peter Doig, who divides his time between Trinidad, London and New York, are densely atmospheric and sometimes uncanny. They are often based on found or private visual material, which the artist pieces together in dreamlike compositions suffused with melancholy and angst. Employing an unusual color palette and possessing an immense sensitivity for his medium, Doig follows in the footsteps of masters such as Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. This publication presents Doig as an artist with a conceptual practice, a visual thinker who is not only fascinated by the history of painting but also the process of painting itself. The large-format paintings and works on paper reproduced in this volume, selected from Doig's entire career, allow the viewer to share his creative passion and his enthusiasm for the power of painting.

Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Peter Doig was raised in Canada and spent two decades in London before moving to Trinidad. Doig graduated from St. Martin's School of Art in 1983 and the Chelsea School of Art in 1990. Hovering between abstraction and figuration and rendered in a rich, sometimes anti-naturalistic color palette, Doig's sumptuous paintings are loved by both critics and collectors alike. Doig was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994 and his work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The artist made headlines in February 2013 when his painting "The Architect's Home in the Ravine" sold for $12,000,000 at a London auction, breaking his previous record.

Genres: Art

176 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2008

Reviews

[Peter West · Rating 5 out of 5]

The single-best book covering Peter Doig's art practice for the price point. High quality photos and exactly what you want from a art-forward book-- mainly art photos and little text. Peter Doig is one of my favorite artists, if not the artist I enjoy the most!

[Janice Gobey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this monograph of Peter Doig's work - great clear photographs of his work with interesting written essays, highly recommended.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love his work and need to find an exhibit. I guess it's time to go to Europe--nothing on public view in the U.S. that I can find.

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Doig's paintings are beautiful and weird. I saw an exhibition a few years ago which left a lasting impression, and they still hold a lot of their presence reproduced in the book.

Peter Doig includes two substantial essays, which have some interesting analytical things to say about Doig’s work. There's also an interview/conversation with the artist. What I found most interesting was the insight into Doig’s creative practice. He works with photographs and film stills: multiple paintings made from one image, paintings composed of a combination of images, a combination of a postcard and a memory. The interference of the photographic medium, effects of overexposure, stills from a low res video all this is worked into the paintings.

[Elisa Goudriaan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Fondation Beyeler in Basel was the first museum that paid attention to Peter Doig’s experimental prints, which in my opninion are the strongest and most beautiful works in this catalogue. The conversation between Ulf Küster and Peter Doig adds a lot to the understanding of Doig’s printmaking process. Often, he tells, he uses a mixture of black ink and fine powdered sugar and by purpose he doesn’t clean the plate properly, so that he gets a kind of granular structure, which gives his etchings the enigmatic character they have. I would love to see these etchings one time in a museum somewhere in the world. In the introduction the organizors of the exhibition (in 2014/2015) write that many of the exhibited paintings derive from private collections, so Doig himself was also looking forward to seeing his own paintings back, all together.

[Paul H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I've spent the last five months systematically working through the history of fine art in all genres (very long review of . . . literally all art TK, for the book that started this journey) -- but now that I'm about two-thirds of the way through, I have to give a shoutout to Peter Doig, who is almost certainly the greatest painter of the past few decades.