About Peter Doig
Peter Doig (b. 1959, Edinburgh) is a British artist and one of the most influential figurative painters of his generation. He spent his early childhood in Trinidad and grew up in Canada, and studied in London at St Martin's School of Art and Chelsea School of Art. Peter Doig became widely known in the early 1990s, at a time when many questioned the relevance of painting in contemporary art. He now divides his time between London and Trinidad.
Peter Doig works from photographs, postcards, film stills and memories, and often lets a source image rest for years before he turns it into a painting. His landscapes and figures sit between the real and the dreamlike, a mix often called magical realism. The empty lake in the painting Swamped (1990) refers to the horror film Friday the 13th, and Lapeyrouse Wall (2004), based on a memory of Trinidad, recalls the quiet mood of Yasujiro Ozu's film Tokyo Story. Recurring subjects in his artworks are the Canadian winter, ski slopes, canoes and lakes, and the Caribbean. The artist also makes limited edition prints in etching and aquatint, where the same motifs return in a reduced, linear form.
The survey of his paintings at Tate Britain in 2008 travelled to Paris and Frankfurt. The retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel followed in 2014 and moved to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2015. In 2023–24 Peter Doig curated Reflections of the Century at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and his work has also been shown at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994 and received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2008. In 2007 his painting White Canoe sold at auction for $11.3 million, then a record for a living European artist. He has also received the Praemium Imperiale for painting. From 2005 to 2017 he was a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
