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.