Lot 17 | Peter Doig | "Study for Ski Jacket"

Spaces of association rooted in reality

Peter Doig's works often feature solitary protagonists, introverted figures in an alien setting. The Scottish artist, who originally wanted to become a stage designer, arranges mysterious scenarios in which the pictorial action is not defined in more detail. The tension-filled ambivalence between the actors and their surroundings reflects the defining artistic theme of Peter Doig: the interplay between figurative representation and purely painterly abstraction. ‘You are looking for a method for pure painting. Painting should develop into a kind of abstraction; it should slowly dissolve into something else, through continued work, by engaging with things. Narrative themes become redundant over time.’ (Peter Doig in: exhib. cat. Peter Doig, Schirn Kunsthalle 2008/9, p. 129 ff)

The starting point for his pictorial ideas comes from a variety of sources, such as his own photographs and found visual material from different thematic contexts such as record covers, film sequences, newspaper clippings, magazine pages. Doig's pictorial inventions do not revolve around a faithful reproduction of the original. Rather, the artist distances himself from the original image source in order to open up a scope for interpretation in which references and associations are obscured. Motivic references thus serve merely as a visual stimulus for the development of a painterly freedom and the exploration of associative potential.

Doig uses the heterogeneous motifs to explore his own pictorial ideas, alienating them through superimposition and the free combination of set pieces. In this volatile complexity, oscillating between objective observation and subjective perception, echoes of memory and dream interact in a tense way.

Doig transforms the concrete shape of the object into an abstracted manifestation, whose suggestive power encounters hidden layers of pictorial memory and releases emotional content. His pictorial worlds thus embody the movement between representational observation and painterly treatment, and visualise the dynamic process of creative transformation, the pictorial genesis in its fragility itself.

Between motif and painting

In Doig's atmospherically charged images, a misty haze sometimes covers the surface of a lake broken up into numerous highlights, while at other times, glistening sunlight extinguishes the colourful foliage of a tropical forest. In the work on paper ‘Study for Ski Jacket’, motifs of an external reality and purely painterly, imagined appearances also blur.

The all-over surface in a diffuse ice-blue colour is interrupted in many places by small-scale, condensed settings in a slightly darker tone. The subtle shift in nuance through structuring short strokes, dabs and colour sprinkles results in a seemingly even pattern that evokes associations with a snow-covered mountain landscape. In this highly abstracted scenario, viewed from a great height, groups of trees and people engaged in winter sports emerge delicately from the snow flurry that envelops everything in a blur. Doig's attention is focused not on reproducing a view, but rather on the material and painterly quality of the snow. The landscape representation takes a back seat to the open possibilities for interpretation in terms of painting and motif: perhaps we are looking at a cloudy view through a window with an icy surface covered in crystalline deposits?

Bettina Haiss