Peter Doig

The Arts Club of Chicago is pleased to announce the opening of a Peter Doig exhibition on Monday, January 27, 2003. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, raised in Canada and Trinidad, a long-time resident of London, and currently residing in Trinidad with his family, Peter Doig (b. 1959) is internationally recognized as one of the most inventive painters working today. Doig’s urban, rural, architectural landscapes, by turns melancholic and hallucinatory, explore the psychological and physical spaces between fiction and truth, depiction and invention, representation and abstraction. The Arts Club of Chicago exhibition will feature selected large-scale oil paintings created within the last ten years as well as a number of works on paper.

Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994 and 1^st-prize winner of the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the previous year, Peter Doig’s experimental approach to surface, texture, and color makes him unique among painters of his generation (his work is often grouped with other British painters Chris Ofili, Fiona Rae, Gary Hume, and Glenn Brown). Doig bases his compositions on personal photographs and images from postcards, travel magazines, and horror films, as well as from popular music and the culture of popular music, which he then layers, photocopies, and sketches until they are several generations from the originals. “People often say that my paintings remind them of particular scenes from films or certain passages from books,” Doig recalls in an interview, “but I think it’s a different thing altogether. There is something more primal about painting. Often I am trying to create a ‘numbness.’ I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult if not impossible, to put into words.”

Doig tends to produce works in series, creating multiple images on paper as well as on canvas. The watercolors and oils on paper that are included in The Arts Club exhibition, most notably Pinto, 2002, Girl in Tree, 2001, and some untitled studies for the painting Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre, 2000-02, can be seen as ruminations on themes and subjects found in a number of the paintings on display.