PETER DOIG | Olin MKIV

Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
Private Collection, Hamburg (acquired from the above in 1996)
Sotheby's, London, 11 February 2010, Lot 200
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

This work is in excellent condition overall. The canvas is slightly loose on the stretcher. Under close inspection, there are various fibrous accumulations along the side turning edges of the canvas. Under close inspection, there is a faint vertical area of possible pigment separation approximately two inches from the right edge and 8 inches from the top edge, most likely inherent. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Peter Doig's early life in Canada and the vast deserted landscapes of that country he experienced had a profound effect on his artistic practice. Here, man's insignificance in nature becomes abundantly clear in comparison to the man-made landscape of London, where the artist moved in the 1980s. It is the dramatic contrast between these two opposing habitats which combine powerfully in Doig's work. Highly influenced by the grand tradition of landscape painting in the canon of art history, from Pieter Breughel and Edvard Munch to the Impressionists and the Canadian Group of Seven painters of the early twentieth century, Doig infuses these inspirations with his passion for film, photography, and music to create contemporary paintings of Post-Modern existence. 

Based on a skiing holiday photograph in his extensive image archive, Olin MKIV takes as its subject one of the artist's best known motifs from which he has made several larger variations, each one using a different crop and coloration. The present work possesses an Edward Hopper-like tension whose ambiguous narrative is left tantalizingly out of the viewer's reach. As he has stated, "I think the way that the paintings come out is more a way of trying to depict an image that is not about a reality, but one that is somehow in between the actuality of a scene and something that is in your head" (Peter Doig in Matthew Higgs, Peter Doig – 20 Questions, London 2001, p. 15).

Doig has often referred to his paintings as flashbacks—a cinematic term that is played out in the present work by the featureless silhouetted figures and their other-worldly, nostalgic environment whose glowing forms and colors seem to breath and coalesce into each other. Representative and abstract at the same time, Olin MKIV occupies a twilight zone of reality in which photo-album memory meets waking dream. The effect is one of eerie tranquility—of a snowy idyll frozen under the bewitching spell of the artist's brush. Neither day nor night, the frozen serenity of its green-edged landscape is tinged with a foreboding sense of the unknown emanating from the luminous infeasibility of its palette. Inhabiting the rich seam between memory and imagination, Olin MKIV offers a profound investigation into painting's possibilities in a world suffused with photographic images.