Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994 and winner of the John Moores Foundation Prize the previous year, Peter Doig is known for his exploration of the formal and thematic possibilities of landscape. His experimental approach to surface, texture and colour makes him among the most inventive painters of his generation. His work often deals with subjects at the fringes of normality, peripheral or marginal sites, unnamed places where urban and natural worlds meet.
"People often say that my paintings remind them of particular scenes from films or certain passages from books, but I think it's a different thing altogether. There is something more primal about painting. In terms of my own paintings, there is something quite basic about them, which inevitably is to do with their materiality. They are totally non-linguistic. There is no textual support to what you are seeing. Often I am trying to create a "numbness." I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult if not impossible, to put into words."
Peter Doig, 2001, 20 Questions by Matthew Higgs in Peter Doig, Published by Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia.
