Peter Doig

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York
Private Collection, Switzerland

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Chopper, dating from 1994, the year in which Peter Doig was nominated for the Turner Prize, is one of the most delicate and poetic of the artist’s snow scenes to have been offered at auction. Doig has long been fascinated by the impact of snow on the landscape, finding creative inspiration from the mysterious light effects and colouring caused by snowfall, resulting in one of the most important series of his career so far. The artist has declared: ‘I often paint scenes with snow because snow somehow has this effect of drawing you inwards’ (J. Nesbitt ed., Peter Doig(Exh. Cat.), Tate Britain, 2008, p. 27). Doig lived in Canada between 1966 and 1979, and this idea of looking ‘inward’ perhaps refers to the concept of memory: arguably to the artist’s memories of snow in childhood, yet also perhaps in a wider sense; referencing the idea of stillness and the silence that blankets the world following a fall of snow, inducing a feeling of contemplative meditation in the onlooker.

Doig’s paintings are inspired by photographic sources, either from magazines or newspapers or from his personal archive of images taken with his own camera. Yet the artist does not directly copy the photograph; rather, it is the forms and colours that act as a creative impetus: ‘A photographs is a way of remembering shapes… it’s about what a strange phenomenon form is’ (Peter Doig, in conversation with Chris Ofili, in Ibid. p. 113). Chopper depicts a skier, glimpsed from behind, poised on the brink of a slope, surveying the beauties of the landscape beneath him. Time seems to have been suspended within the work; the skier caught in a moment of stillness before descent, whilst a sense of calm prevails within the town below. The sepia-tinted tones are reminiscent of a photograph from another era, imbuing the image with a sense of gentle nostalgia for a quieter, more reflective age. Chopper forces the viewer to pause and consider, in the manner of the skier at the top of the slope, in order to re-capture the quietude of the actual and mythological past.