Peter Doig

Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959, and his early life was shaped by a series of migrations that would prove formative for his art. His family relocated to Trinidad in 1962 and then to Canada in 1966, and it was the landscapes of those years — snowbound, atmospheric, psychologically charged — that would later become the imaginative territory of his painting. He returned to London in 1979 to study art, completing an MA at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 1990, and it was in the years immediately following that his distinctive vision began to attract serious attention. His painting Blotter won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1993, a moment of early recognition that announced him as one of the most compelling figurative painters of his generation. Works from this period, including The House That Jacques Built (1992), now held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Ski Jacket (1994), held at Tate Modern, London, established the hallmarks of his practice: a layered, almost hallucinatory treatment of landscape in which memory, cinema, and physical place are held in uneasy suspension.

Doig's practice shifted significantly after 2000, when an invitation from Chris Ofili brought him to Trinidad. He established a working studio base at the Caribbean Contemporary Arts Centre near Port of Spain, and the island's light, colour, and social landscape began to permeate his canvases. Grande Rivière (2001–02), now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, marks this transition clearly, while Echo Lake (1998), held at Tate, London, bridges the Canadian and Caribbean phases with its cinematic stillness. From 2004 to 2017 he held a professorship at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, embedding himself in the European institutional world while maintaining his Caribbean studio practice.

His exhibition history reflects the sustained international regard his work commands. Solo presentations have been mounted at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and Kunsthalle Zürich in 2005, at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 2020, and at The Courtauld, London, in 2023. A selection of his STUDIOFILMCLUB posters appeared in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2006, and a solo exhibition of prints, Peter Doig – Places of Imagination, is scheduled at Galerie Boisserée, Cologne, in 2026. His work is held in collections ranging from the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, to the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, the Goetz Collection, Munich, and the Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt. In 2008 he received the Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis from the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and in 2025 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Painting by the Japan Art Association, one of the most prestigious honours in the international art world.