Secession

Peter Doig

12 Apr - 16 Jun 2019

Peter Doig, Lion in the Road (Sailors), 2019, installation view Secession 2019 © Peter Doig / Bildrecht Vienna, 2019, Courtesy the artist and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London, photo: Hannes Böck
Peter Doig, Untitled (Wheelchair), 2019; Untitled (Small Wheel Chair), 2019, Musical Equipment Ltd., 2019, installation view Secession 2019 © Peter Doig / Bildrecht Vienna, 2019, Courtesy the artist and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London, photo: Hannes Böck
Peter Doig, Lion (Fire Down Below), 2019, installation view Secession 2019 © Peter Doig / Bildrecht Vienna, 2019, Courtesy the artist and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London, photo: Hannes Böck
Peter Doig, Bather (Night Wave), 2019; Bather (Sings Calypso), 2019, installation view Secession 2019 © Peter Doig / Bildrecht Vienna, 2019, Courtesy the artist and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London, photo: Hannes Böck
Peter Doig, Two Trees (Music), 2019; Music (Two Trees), 2019, installation view Secession 2019 © Peter Doig / Bildrecht Vienna, 2019, Courtesy the artist and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London, photo: Hannes Böck
Peter Doig, Spearfisher (Red Moon), 2019, installation view Secession 2019 © Peter Doig / Bildrecht Vienna, 2019, Courtesy the artist and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London, photo: Hannes Böck
Peter Doig, Street Scene, 2017
© The Artist, courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London
PETER DOIG
12 April – 16 June 2019

Peter Doig paints representational pictures as though they were abstractions. His spellbinding compositions combine planar forms and a palette that is as bold as it is nuanced with vivid painterly gestures. Many of his works show landscapes—the reflective surface of a pond, shadowy figures trudging through snow, the dense foliage of a tropical forest. Suffused with a sense of dreamy unreality, the scenes often evoke a mood of elegiac melancholy. With a keen eye for the faintly unsettling quality that looms just beneath the surface of his landscapes, Doig insistently probes man’s encounters with nature and the loneliness of the individual. His most recent work shows a growing interest in the human figure.

Drawing on a variety of photographic realities to spur his imagination, Doig interweaves personal recollections with references to art history and pop culture in compositions that unfold complex narratives. His technical mastery of the subtleties of depiction and lyrical brushwork let him translate subjects with a mythical air into thoroughly contemporary paintings. “I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult if not impossible, to put into words.”*
Peter Doig is one of the most influential figurative painters working today. In his exhibition at the Secession—his first solo show in Austria—he will present a new series of works.

*Peter Doig, 2001, 20 Questions by Matthew Higgs in Peter Doig, Published by Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia.

Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959, grew up in Canada, and now lives in Trinidad, London, and New York.
 

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