Provenance Victoria Miro Gallery, London Olbricht Collection, Berlin (acquired from the above in 1996) Christie’s, London, October 19, 2008, lot 18 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Exhibited London, Victoria Miro Gallery, Freestyle, 1996 Bremen, Gesellschaf für Aktuelle Kunst, Peter Doig, Homely, June 22 - August 25, 1996 Kiel, Kunsthalle; Nuremberg, Kunsthalle; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Peter Doig: Blizzard SeventySeven, March 8 - August 16, 1998 Eindhoven, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Twisted, Urban and Visionary Landscapes in Contemporary Painting, September 23 - November 26, 2000, no. 43 (illustrated, p. 35) London, Tate Britain, Peter Doig, February 5 - April 27, 2008, p. 156 (illustrated, p. 77) Literature Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott, Catherine Grenier, eds., Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 158 (illustrated, pp.122-123)
Edvard Munch, Red Virginia Creeper, 1900. Munch Museum, Oslo, Image Scala/Art Resource, NY, Artwork © 2017 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Painted between 1995 and 1996, Red House captures the breakthrough moment in Peter Doig’s artistic development when the thick impasto of his early 1990s paintings thawed to reveal diaphanous miasmas of translucent color. Created in the immediate afermath of his Turner Prize nomination in 1994 which propelled him to international recognition in the art world, Red House meditates on many of the same formal concerns as his masterpiece Ski Jacket, 1994, Tate, London, which was included in this pivotal exhibition. Both works fnd their painterly precedent in Blotter, 1993, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Though these paintings marked a fundamental shif in Doig’s handling of paint, the core tenets of his practice, namely that of the slippage between reality, imagination, and memory, still remain the nexus from which his formal concerns orbit. Red House was featured in the artist’s seminal 1998 solo exhibition Peter Doig: Blizzard SeventySeven, which traveled from the Kunsthalle Kiel, to the Kunsthalle Nuremberg, and fnally to the Whitechapel Gallery, London—the same institution that featured his work when he won the Whitechapel Artist Prize in 1991. Other works featured in the 1998 exhibition that, like the present one, illustrate the crucial infection point in Doig’s oeuvre in the mid-1990s included Boiler House, 1994, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Ski Jacket, 1994, Tate Modern, London; Pine House (Room for Rent), 1994; Bird House, 1995, Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Camp Forestia, 1996; Figure in Mountain Landscape, 1997-98, Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev. In the present work, Doig sets a striking red house against an ethereal expansive twilight sky built up from a rich kaleidoscope of intricately veiled layers of colors. The scene slips in and out of focus, with otherworldly, spectral-like fgures dissolving into the chromatic landscape. Shards of bare birch trees interrupt the composition, their ice-encrusted trunks, conveyed through delicate washes of blue glaze that branch out into lacey webs against the speckled sky. Doig creates tension in the image by juxtaposing the enveloping glow built up from thinned down pigment against the impastoed blobs and stippled splashes of paint that operate to at once convey a sense of depth, and to reiterate the
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