Peter Doig designed this special edition for the Secession.
The artist has repeatedly taken up and varied the motif of the bather in his paintings in recent year. Two of which were on view in his 2019 exhibition in the main room of the Secession. The images are a homage to the American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley – a depiction of Robert Mitchum on a beach in Trinidad – but now Mitchum is nearly unrecognizable, an abstraction that allows Doig to experiment in paint handling and image-making.

Organized as horizontal striations, the manifold color fields not only evoke a range of ambiances between day and night, they also draw attention to the means of painting. Doig is less interested in rendering identifiable, real scenes than in the interplay of representational and compositional elements that, weaving between reality and imagination, meld different planes of perception and recollection.