Peter Doig: "Camp Forestia"

Peter Doig: "Camp Forestia"
DOIG, PETER
1959 Edinburgh

Title: "Camp Forestia".
Date: 1996.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 41 x 31cm.
Notation: Signed, dated and titled verso upper centre: PETER DOIG 1996 "Camp Forestia". Here additionally illegibly inscribed and equipped with directional arrow.

Provenance:
- Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (stamp)
- Bremer Landesbank (acquired from the previous owner in 1996)

- From the celebrated innovator of contemporary figurative painting
- Reduced colourfulness and condensed image detail bring the work close to abstraction
- Uncertainty and dreaminess are characteristic features that also particularly characterise this work

Zoomed painting
It takes some time for the eye to find its way around this small, black and white, thoroughly representational painting: A person is sitting... on a horizontal line... in the upper third of the picture... below him larger and smaller windows... What is upside down here?
Anyone who is a little familiar with the work of British painter Peter Doig is at an advantage and will not immediately lose their footing. In fact, this small canvas is a member of a "family of paintings" from 1996, in which the artist repeatedly varies the motif of a house reflected in the water with a figure sitting on a jetty in front of it (see lot 41). The mutability of the motif seems infinite. Like a director, Peter Doig creates very different-looking narratives and illusory realities by using different colours, sections and also painting sizes. The motif is zoomed in or viewed as if through a colour filter; or the lighting is changed completely: A turquoise daytime sky becomes dark night.
Doig's brushwork - alternating between dry, glazed and impasto - is fast, fleeting and vague. The resulting slight blurring of the motif also contributes to the "visual imbalances".

Member of a family - but an outstanding individual
In this work, Peter Doig has pushed abstraction to the extreme. The house that gives the series its name is barely discernible at the upper edge of the picture. A single, low black window opening, to the left behind the seated figure, is reflected in the water. The bushes are not exactly reflected either. In the lower third of the picture, the reflections of the smaller windows with shutters and the veranda, whose real existence is concealed by the upper edge of the picture, appear unrecognisable as such. Using the most reduced palette between black-grey-olive green and shades of white up to the ivory colour of the canvas ground, Peter Doig builds up this painting in a chiaroscuro and creates the immense pull and lack of support for which his art is so famous. Uncertainty and dreamlike quality are characteristic features of Peter Doig's works, which also characterise this small painting in particular.

The universality of the emotional basis
Peter Doig's youth, which was characterised by various, above all spatial, biographical breaks (see text Lot 41), is repeatedly used as an explanation for the emotional charge of his paintings. This aspect may be helpful. But his significance as an outstanding artist who has had a lasting influence on contemporary art is something else: Although his own experience may have a strong influence on his work, knowledge of this biography is by no means necessary for its reception and general validity. The fragility of one's own point of view and the disquiet caused by a reality that is not securely anchored take hold of the viewer who engages himself with this small canvas.
Alexandra Bresges-Jung


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Arrangement after the auction.



This lot will be sold under standard taxation (Condition of Sale §V5.1)

Explanations to the Catalogue

Peter Doig
Scotland
Figurative Art
Contemporary Art
Post War
1990s
Abstract
Painting
Oil
Landscape