Peter Doig

Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Private Collection, The Netherlands
Haunch of Venison, London
Christie's, New York, May 12, 2004, lot 352
Private Collection, Brussels
Sotheby's, London, February 8, 2007, lot 315
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

This work is in very good condition overall. There are signs of handling and wear along the edges of the canvas. There are signs of craquelure throughout the red areas, noticeably at the head of the truck as well as the lighter-colored bands at the center of the composition. There is ¼ inch long abrasion 8 ¾ inches from the bottom edge and 16 ½ inches from the right edge. In the dark bands at the top and bottom of the composition, there are two circular areas of craquelure, one being 6 ½ inches from the left edge and 3 inches from the bottom edge, and the other at 6 ½ inches from the left edge and 3 inches from the top edge. There is an area of craquelure in the upper right corner 2 ½ inches from the right edge. Under Ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

"Doig opens a perceptual gap between what ought to be the object of human interest and what may well become more intriguing to the eye. He fills gaps in representational figuration with abstracted materiality - streaking, spotting, visually abrasive textures - a combination of qualities that generates an atmospheric mood without referring to anything specific in the natural world." (Richard Schiff and Catherine Lampert, eds., "Drift", Peter Doig, New York, 2011, p. 305)

A master of contemporary figurative painting, Peter Doig is famous for his imageries that depict commonplace, nondescript sceneries infused with a dream-like quality and eerie glow that transport viewers to strange, faraway places. The Scottish artist deftly fuses imagination with memory–his creations of uncanny, often haunting landscapes are enigmatic and unique in their oscillation between figurative reality and abstracted tactility. In the present painting Hitch-Hiker (Reflected), a lone truck is depicted driving on a highway through an expanse of indeterminable landscape marked by an abstracted background. The atmosphere is dark and ominous, the composition being a mere snapshot of a single moment in the truck-driver’s journey, without any indication of either origin or destination, suspended in time.

Peter Doig’s enigmatic paintings of atmospheric landscapes often denote an underlying theme of transience, transition and journey largely inspired by the artist’s memories and childhood experiences. Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Doig’s early life was characterized by a nomadic lifestyle: Doig moved to Trinidad with his father when he was 2, then relocated to Montreal at age 7, then continued on to Foster, Quebec and then rural Ontario before moving to London in 1979 when he was 19. The present painting, completed soon after his return to England following years in Canada, reflects undertones of both Canada’s landscape of flat, endless highways and forests as well as the transience of a drifter’s way of life with which the artist doubtlessly identified. Hitch-Hiker (Reflected) is highly similar to a seminal painting of Doig’s painted in the same year with the same title in a larger format. Often hailed as a key work among the artist’s early practice, the larger Hitch-Hiker, like the present work, depicts a truck centered in the composition. The surrounding landscape is marked by an empty field below dark woods and mountains in the distant as well as a stormy, weather-filled sky above, all of which are elements built in large part from memories of Canadian prairies Doig knew intimately well. The truck, Doig once told the critic Gareth Jones, is heading west, “with all that implies for a North American,” on the road between Montreal and Toronto, near where the artist’s father lived (Adrian Searle, Peter Doig, “Survey,” London, 2007, p. 52). The theme of journey and drifting is a preoccupation of Doig and recurs time and again in his artistic output.

Doig’s success and reputation as one of the most celebrated painters of our time are cemented through his unique and unparalleled ability to seamlessly fuse abstraction into figuration. Incorporating representational imagery with abstracted materiality, Doig often times utilizes texture as a means to open space beyond traditional linear perspective. In Hitch-Hiker (Reflected), the surface of the canvas is defined by juxtapositions of thin and thick, watery and viscous applications of paint, all cumulating into a rich texture of blurred layers and texture. Such abstracted materiality has no ties to reality and the natural world, yet they generate an atmospheric mood of tension and psychological intrigue which are as mesmerizing as they are disorienting.

The abstraction of Peter Doig’s early masterpieces are drawn upon a wealth of art historical references. The composition of Hitch-Hiker (Reflected) is arranged into three distinct horizontal panels: the top register represents the sky, the bottom register denotes the foreground, the sky’s reflection, and the middle register is reserved for the truck and highway and their reflection. This doubling or reflecting quality is a celebrated compositional element in many of Doig's most important works. Through the dark bands of bluish, brown pigment that run across the top and bottom of the landscape where the sky and ground should be, Doig explores the physical possibilities of paint and deftly stretches its limit. While such division is partly employed to suggest an abstracted sense of linear perspective, Doig also notes that the stylistic construct of the three distinct registers also evolved from "those [Barnett] Newman paintings with the 'zips'–the ones with the little seemingly organic section', particularly those in a horizontal format, like Horizon Light (1949), with its organically brushy 'zip'". He explains: "I thought I could literally expand upon [the Newman effect] and have two abstract-organic sections and a middle that was somehow the 'grasshopper,'" (Peter Doig, quoted in Richard Schiff, "Incidents", Peter Doig, Exh. Cat., London, Tate Britain, 2008, p. 23). This passage of abstraction seems to stand in front, like a blind only partially rolled to reveal a panoramic scene. This is a conscious mistake in atmospheric perspective; Doig has disregarded the logical requirements of representation and instead, indulges his curiosity as to what paints and solvents can do.

Peter Doig’s paintings are both a semblance of reality and a vestige of imagination. His canvases are often times an abstracted abyss of psychological mood charged with an undertow of uncertainty. Paintings like Hitch-Hiker (Reflected) transform the traditional genre of landscape into surreal representations of worlds beyond the boundaries of reality that can only be reached in the mind and through the eye. These fictionalized images are journeys real and metaphorical, places of momentary arrival and departure, psychological no-man's-lands–all of which are iconic of Doig's art.

"I'm interested in mediated, almost cliché notions of a pastoral landscape," Doig explains, "in how notions about the landscape are manifested and reinforced in, say, advertising or film. Yet at the same time many of the paintings are rooted in my own experience. There exists a tension between these two approaches, between the often generic representation of a pastoral scene and the investment in my own experience of the landscape," ("Peter Doig: 20 Questions (extract)", Adrian Searle, ed., Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 131).