Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh, and in 1962 moved with his family to Trinidad, where his father worked with a shipping and trading company, and then in 1966 to Canada. He went to London in 1979 to study fine art at the Wimbledon School of Art, St Martin's School of Art and Chelsea School of Art, where he received an MA. In the mid-1980s he lived and worked in Montreal. In 1993 Doig won the first prize at the John Moores exhibition with his painting Blotter. This brought public recognition, cemented in 1994, when he was nominated for the Turner Prize. In 1999 he selected EASTinternational with Roy Arden. From 1995 to 2000 he was a trustee of the Tate Gallery. In 2002, Doig moved back to Trinidad, where he set up a studio at the Caribbean Contemporary Arts centre near Port of Spain, and also became professor at the fine arts academy in Düsseldorf, Germany. In 2005 he was one of the artists exhibited in part 1 of The Triumph of Painting at the Saatchi Gallery in London. In 2007, a painting of Doig's, entitled White Canoe, sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist. Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles said in an interview that the sale made Doig go from being “a hero to other painters to a poster child of the excesses of the market." |
