Peter Doig (Rizzoli Classics): -compact edition-

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Sheena Wagstaff in Gifts of Art: The Met's 150th Anniversary. Ed. Jennifer Bantz et al. New York, 2020, pp. 170, 198, ill. (color). Doig’s unfinished paintings, including some for the Courtauld, follow him around the world. “Some I started in New York, others in Trinidad. Often I’d do them in distemper paint, then roll them up and post them to myself, making sure they are fumigated so termites don’t eat through the canvas stretchers. I don’t like finishing things really. I like to have things on the go. Actually, I like paintings where you can question whether they’re finished.” Many of the Cézannes at Tate Modern’s current retrospective are like that, he says. “Some look like they were taken off the easel by someone else.” As well as showing a major group of Doig’s new paintings in The Courtauld’s Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, at the same time, the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery is showcasing the artist’s work as a printmaker with a display that unveils for the first time a series of prints Doig made in response to the poetry of his friend and collaborator, the late Derek Walcott (1930-2017). For Doig, printmaking is an integral part of his artistic life: his prints and his paintings often work in dialogue with one another. By showcasing this vital aspect of his practice, visitors will be able to explore the full span of Doig’s creative process. Published to accompany Doig’s major European traveling retrospective originating at Tate Britain, this extremely satisfying and lavishly illustrated book provides a comprehensive account of the artist’s practice over two decades of extraordinary achievement. It is the most thorough overview of his work to date. With an essay by art historian Richard Shiff, an introduction by Tate curator Judith Nesbitt and an illuminating conversation between Doig and his friend, the artist Chris Ofili, this is an enlightening survey of one of the most influential painters at work today. That questioning surfaces in Two Trees, one of his best recent paintings. It’s another Trinidadian picture, originally commissioned by the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum to sit alongside its works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, most notably Hunters in the Snow. Like that famous scene, Doig’s painting is dominated by bare-limbed trees, but it goes way beyond the Flemish master’s vision, having been inspired by a view from his window in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. Three nocturnal figures stand before the sea, silhouetted by a setting moon like escapees from a Munch fjord.

Friends get free unlimited entry to The Courtauld Gallery and exhibitions including The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig, priority booking to selected events, advance notice of art history short courses, exclusive events, discounts and more. To become a Friend, please visit courtauld.ac.uk/friends A tall, bearded man in white shorts walks across a tropical beach, glaring at the viewer. He is dragging something behind him, something we can’t quite see, because it’s in deep shadow, but the walker has just come into an abstract wash of whitish-blue paint—late-afternoon sunlight breaking through overhead palm trees—and his features are clearly visible. There is something troubling about this bearded man. The painting, although startlingly beautiful in its velvety, deep-viridian play of light and shadow, makes us uneasy. There’s a story here, one that may not end well, but we don’t know what it is.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. after newsletter promotion I don’t like finishing things. I like paintings that make you wonder if they’re finished At the Courtauld Gallery, a small show of recent work by Peter Doig (b.1959), the Scottish-born artist now living in London again after years in Trinidad. Such an exhibition should be a tonic in these late winter days: here is so much colour. But be warned. His vast canvases are not sun lamps for the soul.

Hitch Hiker” also gave him the idea of using his Canadian experience in his work. “I suddenly had a subject that I hadn’t had before,” he said. Canada had always seemed familiar and mundane to him, but now, in London, it became exciting. During his time at Chelsea, and for the next few years, Doig painted what he called “homely” suburban houses, frozen ponds, ski areas, and open fields. The houses in these early paintings look uninhabited and desolate, and you see them through a screen of trees or underbrush, or blurred by falling snow. (He went on to paint architect-designed houses—including Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Briey-en-Forêt, France, half hidden behind a screen of trees.) He was painting spaces that you had to make an effort to look into. Ben Street in The Shape of Time. Ed. Sabine Haag and Jasper Sharp. Exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Cologne, 2018, p. 132, ill. pp. 131 (color) and 133 (color, installation photo). He has long admired the collection of The Courtauld Gallery and the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists who are at its heart have been a touchstone for Doig’s own painting and printmaking over the course of his career. Visitors will be able to consider Doig’s contemporary works in the light of paintings by earlier artists in The Courtauld’s collection that are important for him, such as those by Cézanne, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Van Gogh.Andrew L. Shea. "Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery." newcriterion.com. October 17, 2017, ill. (color).

The daughter of an architect, Mogadassi met Doig when she came to work for his New York dealer, Gavin Brown, in 2010; she is now an independent curator who also works for the Michael Werner Gallery, which has exclusively represented Doig worldwide since 2012. In addition to the end of his marriage, Doig has had to cope with the recent death of his father, to whom he was very close, and with a protracted lawsuit, in which he had to prove that he had not painted a work that was attributed to him. Although the ensuing trial kept him away from his studio for months at a time, the paintings he has done in the past two years are among the most powerful and disturbing of his career. “Now, with all that trauma behind him, he’s freed up,” Mogadassi said to me. “He’s at an age when he doesn’t have anything to lose.” Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak), 2015 A major exhibition of new and recent works by Peter Doig – including paintings created since the artist’s move from Trinidad to London in 2021 – is now open at The Courtauld Gallery. This painting is about being complicit, being involved in something terrible’ … Two Trees, from 2017. Photograph: Peter Doig/Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and LondonChange the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Calvin Tomkins. "The Mythical Stories in Peter Doig's Paintings." newyorker.com. December 11, 2017.