Peter Doig paints representational pictures as though they were abstractions. His spellbinding compositions combine planar forms and a palette that is as bold as it is nuanced with vivid painterly gestures. Many of his works show landscapes—the reflective surface of a pond, shadowy figures trudging through snow, the dense foliage of a tropical forest. Suffused with a sense of dreamy unreality, the scenes often evoke a mood of elegiac melancholy. With a keen eye for the faintly unsettling quality that looms just beneath the surface of his landscapes, Doig insistently probes man’s encounters with nature and the loneliness of the individual. His most recent work shows a growing interest in the human figure.
