Peter Doig

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2005

London, Bank Art Space, Burbage House, Zombie Golf, 1995, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is much brighter and more vibrant with more saturated colours throughout the original. There is greater depth and variety to the green tones throughout the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are some horizontal cracks to the wooden board, original to the artist's choice of medium. There is a tiny surface media loss in the top right hand corner and a few fine cracks to the thicker areas of paint. There is a spot to the right of the top extreme edge which fluoresces under ultra-violet light.
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Drawing upon the rich heritage of landscape painting and colouring it with his own experiences and upbringing in the vast Canadian wilderness, Peter Doig's eerie depictions of rural panoramas take as their subject humanity's ambiguous placement within its surroundings and the tensions that arise when the two spheres collide. Like a master composer, Doig seamlessly blends the disparate visual influences that inspire his paintings into a language entirely his own. Selecting motifs from a wide range of contemporary and traditional sources, and adding them into his extensive visual archive of snapshots and personal memories, the images Doig creates possess an uncanny feeling of familiarity as well as an tangible sense of impending, cinematic drama.

In Zombie Golf Doig transports the viewer onto a mountainous golf course whose manmade carefully-manicured contours lie juxtaposed within the surrounding wilderness of its rugged landscape. Curiously devoid of human life or activity, the feeling of silence and estrangement that Doig casts over this otherwise idealised, picture-postcard setting is heightened by the lurid, dreamy palette of its forms and the fluid organic shapes of the wooden board underneath the image which together challenge the serenity of the picture plane. As Doig explains,

"At the time I was thinking about how the effect of a material could be used to describe conditions of weather or to suggest weather....Maybe the surface is an abstraction of the memory of being in a certain frame of mind under certain weather conditions and in certain places." (Peter Doig quoted in 'Kitty Scott in, conversation with Peter Doig', in Adrian Searle, Et al., Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 14)