Gavin Brown's enterprise and Michael Werner Gallery are pleased to announce a joint exhibition of new works by Peter Doig. This is the artist's first solo exhibition of new paintings in the United States in nearly 10 years.
Peter Doig is widely recognized as one of the most accomplished and inventive painters working today; few artists of his generation have done as much to explore the evocative possibilities of paint and its capacity for depth and meaning. His large-scale scenes depicting atmospheric landscapes and lone figures explore the psychological and physical spaces between description and invention, representation and abstraction. The works are often derived from photographic sources, but these are merely a point of departure for the artist's imagination. His uncommon palette and varied approach to the material and surface of paint mediates his art's literal sources into artificial scenes evocative of dreams or recollections. Peter Doig's paintings, by turns melancholic and hallucinatory, are quiet occasions for contemplation and looking that take us outside the realm of our normal daily experience.
People look at paintings in a very different way from how they look at just about anything else...It's a sort of strange, lost scrutiny...
-the artist in conversation with Chris Ofili, August 2007
Peter Doig: New Paintings follows the artist's widely acclaimed traveling exhibition organized in 2008 by Tate Britain, London, in coöperation with ARC/Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. This survey exhibition explored recurring images and motifs in the artist's work by bringing together important series of major paintings and related works on paper from the past 20 years. It was the most in-depth and comprehensive overview of Peter Doig's work to date.
Peter Doig was born in Scotland in 1959 and raised in Canada before returning to Britain in 1979. He lived for many years in London before moving to Trinidad, where he now lives and works. Peter Doig was awarded the prestigious John Moores Foundation Prize in 1993 and was nominated for the Turner Prize the following year. From 1995 to 2000 he was a trustee of the Tate Gallery. In 2008 he was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Society for Modern Art, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Important solo museum exhibitions include Homely, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 1996; Blizzard Seventy Seven, Kunsthalle Kiel, Kunsthalle Nuremburg, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1997; Echo Lake, Museum of Contemporary Art Miami, Berkeley Art Museum, and St. Louis Art Museum, 2000; Almost Grown, The Power Plant, Toronto, 2001; Charley's Space, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht and Carré d'Art contemporain de Nimes, 2003; Metropolitain, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, 2004; and STUDIOFILMCLUB, Museum Ludwig Cologne and Kunsthalle Zurich. His work was included in the 2004 Carnegie International; Day for Night, the 2005 Whitney Biennial; Still Points of the Turning World, SITE Santa Fe's Sixth International Biennial, 2006; and The Painting of Modern Life, Hayward Gallery, London, and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2007.
Peter Doig: New Paintings opens 17 January and is on view at Gavin Brown's enterprise and Michael Werner Gallery through 14 March. An opening reception will be held at Gavin Brown's enterprise, 17 January, 6 to 8 p.m.
Michael Werner Gallery, 4 East 77 Street, is open Monday through Saturday from 10 to 6. Gavin Brown's enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 6. For more information contact Jason Duval at Michael Werner Gallery (jason@michaelwerner.com); and Jenny Borland at Gavin Brown's enterprise (jenny@gavinbrown.biz).