Peter Doig
Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work since his mid-career retrospective shown at Tate Britain, London; Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt in 2008 but also the first exhibition of its kind to be presented in North America. This landmark event is part of an ambitious season of exhibitions of contemporary art at the MMFA.
The exhibition is a co-production with the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, where it was on view in the summer and autumn of 2013 and met with great critical success. The exhibition will make only one stop in North America, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. For the Scottish painter, presenting the exhibition in the two cities that have played a vital role in his life as an artist - Edinburgh, where he was born and Montreal, where he spent some of his youth and where he returned to as an adult, is deeply meaningful.
Over a career of nearly three decades, Doig has reinvigorated a medium considered by many to have fallen into irrelevance. His inventive style, uncommonly sensuous palette and suggestive imagery have set him apart from many of his contemporaries. A willingness to take up the challenge still posed by the paintings of Gauguin, Matisse, Bonnard, Marsden Hartley and Edward Hopper, places Doig in a long line of great colourists, expressive handlers of paint and creators of richly textured worlds.
Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, is the first survey exhibition devoted to the artist’s output since he first visited and later settled in Trinidad in 2000 and 2002 respectively. The move marked a turning point in his painting. As fellow Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in The Silverado Squatters: “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”
During the period covered by the works in this exhibition, Doig, while based in Trinidad, has also divided his time between London, New York and Düsseldorf. Having left Edinburgh as a small child, his peripatetic life and memories of growing up in Canada, before studying and living in London for 20 years, have given Doig a particularly rich visual knowledge and archive of motifs, which he draws from continually in his work
Credits and curators
The exhibition is organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. The co-curators of the exhibition are Stéphane Aquin, MMFA Curator of Contemporary Art, Keith Hartley, Chief Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. This exhibition would not have been possible without the invaluable contribution of the Michael Werner Gallery of New York and London, particularly Gordon VeneKlasen, Parinaz Mogadassi and Harry Scrymgeour. The Museum would like to underscore the major contribution made by the RBC Royal Bank, presenting sponsor of the exhibition in Montreal. The MMFA also wishes to thank its exhibition partners: Joe Fresh, Bell, Air Canada, Richter, La Presse and The Gazette. The exhibition has also benefited from the invaluable support of the Volunteer Association of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
