A brush with… Peter Doig—podcast – The Art Newspaper

Doig, who was born in Edinburgh in 1959 however grew up in Trinidad and Canada, has created a relentlessly creative and evolving physique of work over the previous 40 years. Knowledgeable by reminiscence, Doig’s personal pictures and located pictures, an intimate information and interpretation of artwork historical past, a profound response to put and structure, and by pictures and moods evoking various cultural varieties past visible artwork, his works possess a poetic and sonorous sense of feeling and ambiance.

Usually realised over a few years, every portray is exclusive fairly than a part of a sequence, even when it shares recurring iconography with different items. Essentially involved with figuration, Doig attracts on an enormous vary of painterly approaches from resonant stains to thick impasto, stretching his medium to its full expressive potential and into the realms of abstraction. He has stated that he desires portray to be a world unto itself and maybe no different artist of the previous few a long time has created such a particular language for attaining that intention. Certainly, so widespread is his affect that one may describe a painterly strand in latest artwork across the globe as Doigian.

Throughout his profession, Doig’s work has been knowledgeable by a passionate engagement with music. He has stated: “Music, being an invisible artwork type, is open to interpretation throughout the thoughts’s eye, and reflections from the thoughts’s eye are sometimes what I’m making an attempt to depict in my work.” He achieves a selected tonality and atmosphere that evoke his aspiration to the situation of that artwork type, an element emphasised in Home of Music, his exhibition on the Serpentine South till 8 February 2026.

He discusses a number of of the work in that present in depth, and displays on his altering response to Trinidad, the place he was primarily based between 2002 and 2019, and his references within the work to the “residues of imperialism”. Amongst a lot else, he discusses the early affect of Edward Burra, his enduring fascination with Henri Matisse, his response to early graffiti artwork in New York, and his present fascination with Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John the Baptist (1608). He talks about his friendship and collaboration with the poet Derek Walcott and the significance to his work of STUDIOFILMCLUB, the repertory cinema he based in his Port of Spain studio with Che Lovelace. Plus, he offers perception into his life within the studio, and solutions our ordinary questions, together with the last word: “what’s artwork for?”

Peter Doig: Home of Music, Serpentine South, London, till 8 February 2026. There are a variety of Sound Service occasions on Sundays by means of the size of the exhibition, in addition to different night classes. Go to serpentinegalleries.org to seek out out extra.

This podcast is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the humanities and tradition platform. Bloomberg Connects provides entry to an enormous vary of worldwide cultural organisations by means of a single click on, with new guides being added commonly. They embrace a lot of UK museums which have proven and picked up the work of Peter Doig, together with The Courtauld, Tate and the Serpentine; his exhibition Home of Music continues at Serpentine South till 8 February 2026. Within the Serpentine information, you may learn an excerpt of Peter’s illuminating interview concerning the exhibition with the Serpentine’s inventive director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, learn Peter’s feedback concerning the works Portray for Wall Painters and Maracas, and obtain the complete exhibition information, with particulars of extra key work within the present and an interview with the cultural critic Michael Bracewell. You can too discover out extra concerning the exhibition at Serpentine North, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, with audio content material from the artist and the group behind the present.