Peter Doig facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Peter Doig
|
|
|---|---|
Doig at the No Foreign Lands exhibition (2013).
|
|
| Born | 17 April 1959 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
|
| Education | Wimbledon, Saint Martin's & Chelsea Schools of Art |
| Known for | Painting |
Peter Doig (born 17 April 1959) is a famous painter from Scotland. He has lived and worked in many different countries, including Trinidad, Canada, the USA, Germany, and Britain. From 2002 to 2021, he lived in Trinidad with his family. He then moved back to London.
Peter Doig is best known for his unique landscape paintings. His art often shows scenes inspired by his own life. These include snowy places and ski scenes from his childhood in Canada. He also paints beaches and jungles from his time in Trinidad. In 2007, one of his paintings, White Canoe (1990-91), sold for a lot of money. It set a new record for a living European artist at an auction. Many art critics admire his work for its imagination and creativity.
Contents
Early life and education
Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959. When he was three years old, his family moved to Trinidad. His father worked there for a shipping company. In 1966, they moved again to Canada.
After finishing school in Scotland, Peter Doig decided to study art. He moved to London in 1979. He attended the Wimbledon School of Art, Saint Martin's School of Art, and Chelsea School of Art. He earned his Master of Arts degree in 1990. While studying, he also worked part-time helping actors with their costumes at the English National Opera.
In 2000, Peter Doig was invited to return to Trinidad. He joined his friend, painter Chris Ofili, for an artist's stay. In 2002, Doig moved back to the island permanently. He set up his art studio near Port of Spain. He also became a professor at the Fine Arts Academy in Düsseldorf, Germany. He taught there until 2017.
Artistic style and inspiration
Many of Peter Doig's paintings are landscapes. Some of them show snowy scenes, reminding him of his childhood in Canada. Others are inspired by the beautiful scenery in Trinidad. He gets ideas for his paintings from many places. These include old photographs, newspaper clippings, and even movie scenes. He also looks at record album covers.
Doig is inspired by famous artists like Edvard Munch and Claude Monet. Even though he often uses photos as a starting point, his paintings do not look exactly like photographs. He once said that his paintings "made no attempt to reflect setting." This means he uses photos as a guide, but he creates his own unique world in his art.
After he finished art school, Peter Doig won the Whitechapel Artist Prize. This led to his first solo art show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1991. Some of his important works from this show include Swamped (1990) and The Architect's Home in the Ravine (1991). The painting The Architect's Home in the Ravine shows a modern house in a forest in Toronto, Canada.
Peter Doig often paints signs of human life in natural places. His "Concrete Cabins" series is a good example. He painted a series of works about a famous modern building in France called l'Unité d’Habitation. This building is partly hidden by the forest around it. Doig found it interesting how the building appeared and disappeared among the trees. He said he was excited by what he saw and wanted to paint it.
Doig also includes references to popular culture in his art. In the late 1990s, he created paintings of a tunnel in Toronto. An unknown artist painted a rainbow over this tunnel in 1972. The rainbow has been repainted many times over the years. His 1997 painting Canoe-Lake was inspired by a movie. In 2003, Doig started a weekly film club called StudioFilmClub with artist Che Lovelace. Doig chose the movies and even painted posters to advertise them. He found this project very freeing and immediate.
Major exhibitions
Peter Doig has had many important art shows around the world. Some of these include exhibitions at Tate Britain in London (2008), the Dallas Museum of Art (2005), and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2004).
In 2013, his first big exhibition in his home country, Scotland, was held. It was called No Foreign Lands and took place at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. This show featured many works he created while living in Trinidad. It was highly praised by art critics.
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts held a major exhibition of his work in North America in 2014. A large show of his art also opened at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2014. It then traveled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 2015.
More recently, in February 2023, a new exhibition of his paintings opened at London’s Courtauld Gallery. This show included 12 paintings and 20 works on paper. Most of these paintings were made in London after he moved back from Trinidad in 2021. Critics greatly admired his painting skills in this exhibition. In late 2023 and early 2024, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris hosted two exhibitions by Doig. One showed his large paintings, and the other featured historical artworks from the museum's collection that Doig himself chose.
In 2023, Peter Doig created a special print of Linton Kwesi Johnson. The money raised from selling these prints helps support the George Padmore Institute.
Awards and recognition
In 1993, Peter Doig won first prize at the John Moores exhibition for his painting Blotter. This helped him become more widely known. In 1994, he was nominated for the famous Turner Prize.
From 1995 to 2000, he served as a trustee for the Tate Gallery. In 2009, he received an award for his artistic contributions to the fight against AIDS. He was also named the 2017 Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon. In 2025, Peter Doig won the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award for painting.
Art market success
Peter Doig's paintings are very valuable. In 2007, his painting White Canoe (1990-91) sold for $11.3 million at Sotheby's. This was a record price for a painting by a living European artist at the time.
In 2013, another painting, The Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991), sold for about £7.66 million. Later that year, his painting Jetty (1994) sold for $11.3 million. In 2014, Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre (2000-02) sold for over $17 million. His painting Swamped sold for $25.95 million in 2015 and then for $39 million in 2021. In 2016, his 1991 painting Rosedale sold for $28.8 million, setting a new auction record for him at that time.
In 2016, there was a legal case about a painting that someone claimed was by Doig, but he said it wasn't. A court in Chicago decided that the painting was actually by a different artist with a similar name, Peter Doige. In 2023, Doig was awarded $2.5 million in a ruling related to this case.
Museum collections
Peter Doig's artworks are held in many important museums and private collections around the world. Some of these include:
- The Tel Aviv Museum of Art (The House that Jacques Built, 1992)
- Tate, London (Echo Lake, 1998; Ski Jacket, 1994)
- The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (Grande Riviere, 2001-02)
- The British Museum, London
- Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
- National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
- Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris
- Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Dallas Museum of Art
See also
In Spanish: Peter Doig para niños
