Doig's quiet path to art recognition, record price

By Mike Collett-White

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - While British artist Damien Hirst and his crowd rocketed to fame and fortune in the early 1990s, contemporary painter Peter Doig's rise to prominence has been glacial by comparison.

A new exhibition of his work at London's Tate Britain museum, featuring over 50 canvases, seeks to explain how Doig, born in 1959, was often seen as out of touch at a time when conceptual art eclipsed figurative painting in the media's eyes.

The show, which runs from to April 27 before traveling to Paris and Fankfurt, underlines Doig's reputation as a master of the suggestive through his dream-like, haunting paintings.

"This was not something his contemporaries were doing, so from the beginning he was out on a limb and doing his own thing with figurative painting," said exhibition curator Judith Nesbitt. "In the 1990s, many were confounded by his work.

"The buzz in the early 1990s was very much focused on the Goldsmiths crowd -- his contemporaries like Gary Hume and Damien Hirst," Nesbitt told Reuters. "He didn't feel a part of that and didn't want to be a part of it."

As if by stealth, however, Doig has made it to the pinnacle of his profession.

One of his canoe paintings sold at auction a year ago for 5.7 million pounds, which was five times the predicted value and the highest price paid for a living European artist.

Doig, who moved to Trinidad in 2002, said in a recent interview that the amount spent on the picture had made him feel sick, and did not make painting any easier.

"It made me wonder: what am I doing this for?" he told the Observer newspaper last month.

SCOTTISH-BORN

Doig was born in Edinburgh, moved to Trinidad and then to Canada as a young child. He later came to London where he attended art school and entered his work into group exhibitions in the early 1980s.

"His reputation has grown steadily from the early 1990s when he began to be recognized and marked out," Nesbitt explained.

While he has drawn on many traditions in European painting, he relies heavily on photographs and still images from video footage for his inspiration.

His series of pictures of a postwar housing project located in a forest in northern France was based on stills taken from videos he made of the building.

And the canoe paintings, for which Doig is probably best known, were inspired by a scene from horror movie "Friday the 13th".