PETER DOIG's Red House estimated for $18-22 mln

“I am always interested in what we miss when we try to focus on what we see.” – Peter Doig

Painted between 1995 and 1996, Red House captures the breakthrough moment in Peter Doig’s artistic development when the thick impasto of his early 1990s paintings thawed to reveal diaphanous miasmas of translucent color. Created in the immediate aftermath of his Turner Prize nomination in 1994 which propelled him to international recognition in the art world, Red House meditates on many of the same formal concerns as his masterpiece Ski Jacket, 1994, Tate, London, which was included in this pivotal exhibition. Both paintings find their precedent in Blotter, 1993, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Though these paintings marked a fundamental shift in Doig’s handling of paint, the core tenets of his practice, namely that of the slippage between reality, imagination, and memory, still remain the nexus from which his formal concerns orbit. Red House was featured in the artist’s seminal 1998 solo exhibition Peter Doig: Blizzard Seventy-Seven, which traveled from the Kunsthalle Kiel, to the Kunsthalle Nuremberg, and finally to the Whitechapel Gallery London – the same institution that featured his work when he won the Whitechapel Artist Prize in 1991. Other works featured in the 1998 exhibition that, like the present one, illustrate the crucial inflection point in Doig’s oeuvre included Boiler House, 1994, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Ski Jacket, 1994, Tate Modern, London; Pine House (Room for Rent), 1994; Bird House, 1995, Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Camp Forestia, 1996; Figure in Mountain Landscape, 1997-98, Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev.

In Red House, Doig sets a striking red house against an ethereal, expansive twilight sky built up from a rich kaleidoscope of intricately veiled layers of colors. The scene slips in and out of focus, with otherworldly, spectral-like figures dissolving into the chromatic landscape. Shards of bare birch trees interrupt the composition, their ice-encrusted trunks, conveyed through delicate washes of blue glaze that branch out into lacey webs against the speckled sky. Doig creates tension in the image by juxtaposing the enveloping glow built up from thinned down pigment against the impastoed blobs and stippled splashes of paint that operate to at once convey a sense of depth, and to reiterate the very nature of the medium. Doig revels in these dichotomies that his painterly style elicits, noting "I am always interested in what we miss when we try to focus on what we see" (Peter Doig, quoted in Harald Fricke, "Drifter: An Interview with Peter Doig”, db artmag, 2004, online).

Peter Doig is widely considered one of the most renowned contemporary figurative painters. Born in Scotland and raised in Trinidad and Canada, Doig achieved his breakthrough in 1991 upon being awarded the prestigious Whitechapel Artist Prize and receiving a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

Doig draws on personal memories and source imagery in his pursuit of exploring the slippage between reality, imagination and memory through painting. The material properties of paint and expressive possibilities of color thereby serve to approximate the foggy, inarticulate sensation of remembering. His practice maintains a thin and balanced line between landscape and figure, superimposing photographic imagery and memories, both real and imagined.