08 January 2018

Peter Doig (at Michael Werner)

First, my favourite in the show (till 17 February ) -
Figures at Night, 2017 - oil on stretched craft paper
 Some of the paintings were on vellum and had folds and wrinkles of the substrate painted in. (Why?) Others were a sort of series, or exploration, or preparation ... "the Rastafarian Lion of Judah" -


 The room - the Winter Garden - in this Mayfair gallery was somewhat splendid (the house was built in the 1740s) -
Peter Doig currently lives and works in Trinidad.  "Doig was a friend and collaborator with Derek Walcott, the Nobel prize-winning Caribbean poet who died this year and whose epic work Omeros transposes the myths of Homer to the West Indies. Doig’s new paintings are similarly Homeric, or Walcottian. He sees his Trinidad home as a place of giants, monsters, blind singers. ...  all the memories and references that end up in Doig’s paintings are transfigured into a bright palette of dreams. This is imaginative art of the highest order." (via)

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