Peter Doig’s landmark The Architect’s Home in the Ravine will lead the Contemporary Art Evening sale in London on 7 March.
Estimated at £14–18 million, the painting dates from 1991, an important milestone in the artist’s career, when, just a year after graduating from his Master’s degree at Chelsea, he was awarded the highly prestigious Whitechapel Artist’s award.
The Architect’s Home in the Ravine was one of only four works the artist chose to be included in the subsequent show at the Whitechapel Gallery. Others include Iron Hill (1991) which became the first work by the artist to sell for over £1 million at Sotheby’s auction in 2006, and Rosedale (1991) which established a new $28.8 million auction record for any living British artist last year. The Architect’s Home in the Ravine was further selected for Doig’s first major institutional show - his 1996 exhibition at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen, Germany.
The early recognition bestowed by the Whitechapel Award spurred a period of intense painterly production and the resultant works are some of the most celebrated of his entire career. Doig views the small number of large format paintings created during this time as the thematic matrix for his subsequent oeuvre and several are now held in permanent museum collections: Ski Jacket (1994) in the Tate, The House that Jacques Built (1991) in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Blotter (1993) in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
The Architect’s Home in the Ravine refers to a building remembered from the artist’s childhood in Canada – the home of Eberhard Zeidler, which is situated in the wealthy Toronto suburb of Rosedale. However, whilst this is the stated subject, the eerie mood and the composition can be better traced to a celebrated building by architect Le Corbusier, the Untié d’Habitation in Briey-en-Fôret in North-East France. In the summer of 1991 Doig visited this site as part of a team of artists and architects working on its restoration; the building had been derelict since 1973. He was struck by the view of the modernist building from the dense surrounding forest. It appeared just out of reach; at once threatening and inviting, comforting and obscure.
Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s European Head of Contemporary Art said: “The Architect’s Home in the Ravine undoubtedly ranks among Peter Doig’s greatest works. Standing in front of it, it is immediately clear as to why he is considered one of Britain’s foremost living painters.”
