Peter Doig, Red Sienna (1985) Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London
20th March – 31st May 2014 www.michaelwerner.com
22 Upper Brook Street, London W1K 7PZ
Michael Werner Gallery, London is to present an exhibition of early works by Peter Doig. The exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of Doig’s formative works from the 1980s and includes several paintings and drawings shown for the first time in the UK.
In a career spanning three decades, Peter Doig has established himself as one of the most inventive and accomplished artists working in painting today. Earning international critical recognition in the early 1990s, Doig reshaped the discussion around painting at a time when many artists and critical thinkers preoccupied themselves with rumours of its death. Obsessed with evocative potential of paint and decidedly pictorial in appearance, Doig’s work embraces the recent history of abstraction, broader traditions of narrative painting and contemporary popular culture. His inventive approach to the language and medium of painting, coupled with a use of photography and cinematic sources, has allowed Doig to create some of the most resonant images in contemporary art. Then as now, his singular approach to painting amounts to a thorough reimagining of the medium’s potential for depth and meaning.
Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959 and raised in Trinidad and Canada before he moved to London in 1979 to study painting. In 2008, he was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Society of Modern Art, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. That same year, Tate Britain organised the artist’s first large-scale career survey exhibition, which later travelled to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Doig has presented several major solo museum exhibitions, including 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, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht and Carré d’Art contemporain de Nimes (2003); Metropolitain, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2004); Go West Young Man, Museum der Bildenden Kunst, Leipzig (2006); and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2010). In 2011, New York’s Metropolitan Opera exhibited works inspired by Wagner’s Ring cycle and in 2013, the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh presented No Foreign Lands, a major exhibition surveying recurrent motifs in Doig’s paintings and drawings from 2000 to the present.
Peter Doig: Early Works opens on 20 March 2014 at Michael Werner Gallery, London and remains on view through 31 May 2014. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a text by Dr. Richard Shiff.
