About the Exhibition

The Gallery at Windsor’s sixth exhibition was the traveling show, Peter Doig: Works on Paper, curated by Kadee Robbins, Director at Michael Werner Gallery, London.  Opening in December 2005, the exhibition was a retrospective look at the Anglo-Canadian artist’s themes of the prior 14 years as seen exclusively through his paper works. It consisted of about 50 pieces and was Doig’s first show in a public gallery dedicated solely to his works on paper.

Doig uses images drawn from photographs, film stills, postcards, paintings and even album covers, which he then re-works and re-interprets, often many times over. He is also influenced by the notions of memory and fantasy. Much of his work has an element of autobiography but avoids specificity. Whether drawn from found images or personal recollections, Doig’s pictures possess an ephemeral quality, a timeless ambiguity that is at once foreign and familiar. Often regarded primarily as a landscape painter, Doig is not tied to precise locales but rather captures what he terms “nowhere places.”

The exhibition was accompanied by a full-color catalogue with introduction by the renowned author Margaret Atwood.

About the Artist

Peter Doig is a contemporary Scottish artist, celebrated as one of the most important representational painters working today. Born in Edinburgh in 1959, he soon after moved to Trinidad where he spent his early childhood. In 1966, he moved again to Canada, remaining there until 1979 when he left for London to attend Wimbledon School of Art.

Doig received his B.A. degree from St. Martin’s School of Art in 1983 and went on to get his MA from the Chelsea School of Art in 1990. With his 1994 Turner Prize nomination, Doig became a central figure in Britain’s increasingly high-profile art scene dominated at the time by the provocative YBAs (Young British Artists). Unlike many of these artists who chose to break with traditional materials, Doig became known for his signature atmospheric oil paintings and haunting works on paper.

In 2007, his painting White Canoe sold at Sotheby’s for $11.3 million, which was at the time an auction record for a living European artist. In 2013, his painting, The Architect’s Home in the Ravine, sold for $12 million at a London auction.  Doig has lived and worked in Trinidad since 2002. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Goetz Collection in Munich, among others.