THE contemporary

prize was finally attributed to the sculptor Antony
Gormley, his nomination generated considerable
public exposure.
The same year, he joined Victoria Miro’s London
gallery and subsequently enjoyed a series of exhibitions
in major Western cities: Berlin in 1995, Berkeley,
Saint Louis and Miami in 2000, then Vancouver
and Toronto in 2001. The Michael Werner
Gallery subsequently became involved and organised
a first show in 2002. Werner’s is one of the best
addresses in New York, capable of projecting artists
into the international limelight. Peter Doig was 43
at the time.
In 2005, already considered a master painter, he
was invited to teach at the Dusseldorf Academy of
Fine Arts, where Paul Klee, Gerhard Richter and
Anselm Kiefer had taught before him. Meanwhile,
he obtained support from Charles Saatchi, former
advertising mogul become eminent art collector
and one of the most influential figures on the British
art scene. Saatchi integrated Peter Doig into his
The Triumph of Painting exhibition at his sumptuous
Chelsea gallery, alongside a number of other rising
stars of Contemporary painting, including Martin
Kippenberger and Daniel Richter.
During the show, his canvas Briey (Concrete cabin)
(1994-96) fetched $632,000 in New York (Christie’s,
11 May 2005). The result was exceptional since the
same work had been acquired in November 2000
in the same auction room for $160,000, thus generating
a 295% return on investment in five years.
After that, the prices of Doig’s works started to soar.
The following year another Doig painting crossed
the million-dollar threshold and then in 2007,
White Canoe (1990-91) fetched $11.2 million, the ultimate
market consecration, and making Doig the
most expensive living European artist.
In 2008, a retrospective show toured Europe, starting
at the Tate Britain, and then migrating to
the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and
the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. A few years
later, the exhibition No Foreign Land – bringing together
early works and archives – was shown in two
cities dear to his heart: Edinburgh, his birthplace,
and Montreal, the city where he spent time as a
young painter developing his style.
The extraordinary momentum of Doig’s career
has recently been confirmed beyond all doubt:
on 11 May of this year, Christie’s offered one of
his most famous paintings, Swamped (1990), in its
ultra-prestigious Looking Forward to the Past sale.
The work fetched $25.9 million. Swamped, which
shows a white canoe floating on the surface of a
lake surrounded by lush autumnal colours, could
be likened to Monet’s Nymphéas. And yet the work
was apparently inspired by the final scene of Sean
Cunningham’s horror film, Friday the 13th, after
Doig photographed the scene on his TV screen.
The canoe, a symbol of passage and by metonymy,
of death, is one of Doig’s emblematic themes, and
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