Volume 55, Number 12 · July 17, 2008
Enchanted & Ominous
By Sanford Schwartz
Peter Doig
an exhibition at Tate Britain, London, February 5–April 27, 2008; the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, May 21–September 14, 2008; and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, October 9, 2008–January 11, 2009.
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Judith Nesbitt, with an essay by Richard Shiff.London: Tate Publishing, 160 pp., £16.99 (paper)
Peter Doig has been seen in a few solo and group shows in New York, Chicago, and Santa Monica over the past fifteen years, but for most Americans who follow contemporary art he remains a hazy figure whose work has been more talked about than viewed. Yet while the artist, who grew up in Canada and has lived in London and Trinidad, hasn't been seen here in full force (or perhaps because of this), he has attracted a certain following, especially among people chiefly involved with painting. A little bit like Eric Fischl in the early 1980s—in his canvases showing adolescents and adults in sometimes uncomfortably intimate domestic scenes—Doig, it is clear even from reproductions, has been finding ways to make strikingly new kinds of images using age-old themes and materials. It is unfortunate that Tate Britain's recent survey of the forty-nine-year-old artist's work couldn't include an American stop on its tour.
Review, 2993 words
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