PETER DOIG | Buffalo Station ’77

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1998

This work is in excellent condition overall. The canvas is unlined. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Framed.
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Executed in 1998, Buffalo Station ‘77 is an entrancing tribute to the influence music and memory have had on the Turner Prize winning artist Peter Doig. Rendered with Doig’s trademark style of exquisite technical and emotional subtly, the canvas captures the crowds outside the Buffalo following a Rolling Stones concert on The Fourth of July 1978. The master of the melancholic mood, Doig’s understanding of the psychology of experience is profoundly exemplified in the present work. Choosing not to show the excitement of anticipation or the unbridled joy of the moment, Doig instead focused on the moment of dispersion - when the crowd slowly streams out of the concert and reluctantly returns to reality. Like with many of Doig’s greatest canvases, the painting acts as recollection of a time-worn memory romanticized in paint with a sense of magical realism. The mysticism of the canvas – where details are held at arm’s length – is enhanced by the light, almost speckled dusting of pigment that textures the surface. Reminiscent of aged discolorations to old photographs or the grainy flicker of a dated video recorder, the subtle texture acts as thin impregnable curtain between the past and the present - masterfully placing the figures tantalizingly just out of the viewer’s grasp.

Although the atmosphere Doig creates is so singularly unique that it resists direct comparison, the silence that holds sway in Buffalo Station ‘77 speaks to the paintings of Edward Hopper while the psychological engagement with figural motifs and color speaks directly to his hero Edvard Munch. Doig, like Munch, collects and then steals from found images - vintage photographs both personal and anonymous, newspaper clippings, even film stills. It is from through here - in a space mediated already by memory and surreal nature of photography itself - that Doig joined the crowds leaving the Rolling Stones’ Buffalo concert exactly two decades on.

A series of several canvases that Doig painted through 1998, the Buffalo Series works form a major stylistic turning point for Doig from the earlier thickly impastoed paintings of the 1980’s towards a lighter, clearer more whimsical style. In many ways, the development towards a lighter style as exemplified in Buffalo Station I was a bold reaction against the impastoed texture of the paintings that had first brought him critical success. Starting with his Ski-Jump and then his Snow paintings in the early-to-mid 1990’s, Doig actively turned to creating clearer less obscured images while focusing the emotional tenor of the work not on compositional devices that shrouded the work but on color. These lighter images culminate in the Buffalo Series, where Doig takes his over-exposed aesthetic to new heights. Executed with a mixture lightness and impasto, Buffalo Station ‘77 must be regarded as a pivotal transition painting that dissects yet included both earlier and later styles.