Peter Doig U. K., 1959

Peter Doig, born in 1959 in Edinburgh, Scotland, stands as one of the most compelling painters working today, creating figurative landscapes that suspend viewers between memory and imagination, abstraction and representation, transforming the familiar into the strange, and the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Doig’s artistic process is characterised by a complex layering technique, employing thin washes of oil paint over translucent glazes. This meticulous approach results in surfaces that exude a palpable presence, enhancing the depth and luminosity of his imagery. His diverse inspirations—ranging from photographs and film stills to album covers and personal memories—inform the enigmatic narratives woven throughout his artwork, which resist singular interpretation and transmute these images into paintings that draw on both individual and collective memories of place.

His childhood experiences, particularly the diverse landscapes he encountered, have significantly influenced his artistic style. Doig’s nomadic childhood significantly influenced his artistic sensibility. His family moved to Trinidad when he was three years old, following his father’s work as a shipping merchant. They then relocated to Canada in 1966, which gave him a sense of being 'always between places.' In 1979, he moved to London to pursue formal art education first at Wimbledon School of Art, and later at Saint Martin’s School of Art, where one instructor famously declared a life drawing of his 'the worst he had ever witnessed’. This experience liberated him, leading to his distinctive approach to using photographic projection to mine found imagery and memory, constructing paintings that exist between documentation and imaginative expression.

After completing his Master of Arts at the Chelsea School of Art in 1990, Doig developed a visual language that emphasised painterly abstraction and the investigation of the traditional medium, distinctly removed from the conceptual strategies of his Young British Artist contemporaries. In 2000, at the invitation of fellow painter Chris Ofili, Doig returned to Trinidad, establishing a studio at the Caribbean Contemporary Arts Centre and reconnecting with the landscape of his early childhood.

Doig's work positions him within a lineage of painters obsessed with the material properties of paint itself, connecting him to masters like J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard, artists who understood colour and surface as vehicles for emotional and psychological resonance. His paintings evoke the tradition of Romantic landscape painting while simultaneously destabilising it, creating what critics have termed 'intermediary worlds’—spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and alien, possessing an awkward grace that the artist himself admires in Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle. Yet Doig transcends these influences through his sophisticated engagement with photographic mediation and painting, the instability of memory, subjecting found images to processes of deconstruction and reconstruction that reveal our collective relationship to visual culture.

Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994, Doig achieved international recognition that has continued to expand. His paintings reside in the permanent collections of major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Rather than documenting specific locations, Doig’s artworks function as portals to possibilities, reconstructing landscapes through a dreamlike, subjective lens that transforms personal and cultural memory into paintings that feel simultaneously immediate and timeless.