Study for English Garden

Christie’s is pleased to present four studies by Peter Doig, held together in the same collection for more than two decades. Featuring some of his most distinctive themes and motifs, they collectively capture the flourishing of the artist's practice during the 1990s, as well as highlighting the central role played by works on paper within his oeuvre. Raised between Canada, Scotland, and Trinidad—where he now lives permanently—Doig has long been intrigued by the mechanics of memory and displacement. Within his atmospheric compositions, the artist merges sources, drawing from album covers and postcards, art history, chance discoveries, and his own photographs and memories to produce introspective images whose meanings are far from resolved. Repeatedly revisiting the same motifs—across multiple formats, media and scales—Doig captures the complex, fragmented sensation of looking back on the past. Each a variation on a theme, these four works offer a captivating insight into the artist's process, charting moments of revisitation and déjà-vu within Doig's cyclical world.

The works produced in the 1990s, while the artist was in London, alternate between nostalgia for a snow-filled youth and Doig’s longing for the balmy Caribbean shores that he later encountered. House at Iron Hill (lot 663) forms part of a watershed series of paintings based on a National Geographic photograph of roadside homes in Maine: a landscape which reminded Doig of the Quebecois topographies of his childhood. Paintings on this theme include Hill Houses (1990-1991), held in the collection of the British Council, and the early masterpiece Iron Hill (1991). Study for Winterpark (lot 662), too, is frosty, but here Doig has introduced a downhill skier, a subject to which he has returned to repeatedly.

Derived from a photograph of the artist, Study for Drifter (lot 664) is an uncanny pastel drawing of a young man perched upon a fence; the work relates to the earlier painting Corn Cob (1994), held in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as the later photo-etching Drifter (2001; Tate Modern, London). Doig’s work is always tethered to the real, but he views painting as a practice which lends itself willingly to subjectivity and daydream. Is the young boy surveying his land in Study for English Garden (lot 665) an image of Doig as a child, a composite memory, or someone else entirely?

Suffused with nostalgia, these four works give image to a remembered feeling: neither wholly concrete nor entirely conceptual, they delight in their own sensorial instability. ‘Painting should evolve into a type of abstraction’, Doig has explained. ‘It should slowly dissipate into something else through time, through working, seeing things through’ (P. Doig, ‘Peter Doig and Chris Ofili in Conversation’, in Peter Doig, exh. cat. Tate, London 2008, p. 121).