Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
Acquired 🌞directly from the above by 🐻the present owner in 2001

Berkeley, Art Museum, Peter Doig/Matrix 183, Echo Lake, 2000

Exhibition Catalogue, Dallas, Museum of Art; (and travelling), Peter Doig, Works on Paper, 2005-2006, no. 76, illustrated in colour

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is softer in the original, with the paper tending more towards cream and slightly lighter greens. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Securely hinged in places to the reverse, the sheet undulates slightly. There are artist's pinholes in all four corner of the composition.
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A testament to the Uncanny and complex aesthetic vocabulary synonymous with Peter Doig's paintings, the present work is one of the most complete and compelling works on paper by the artist to appear at auction. In this painting, Doig creates a horror filmic moment of profound and heavi🐠ly wieghted tension. Depicting a lone figure on a frozen lake within the vast expanse of a wooded landscape, glimpsed through a lattice-like web of leafless branches, the viewer watching from afar, is transported into the role of stealthy assassin or witness to an unfolding drama.

This work, like many of the artist's greatest paintings, contains nostalgia for the rugged natural landscape of Doig's Canadian upbringing. Painted in 2000, it directly references a larger painting that Doig executed simultaneously entitled Target. Like with that work, the fragmentary, highly charged moment that he manifests here, is at once richly described and yet mesmerisingly ambiguous. It reflects his preference for combining numerous, often unrelated, sources into a single image, so that the paintings produced are as much about the complexities and nature of memory, both personal and collective, and the joy of painting, as they are about the depicted image. "People often say that my scenes remind them of particular scenes from films or certain books, but I think it's something different altogether," the artist explained. "There is something more primal about painting. In terms of my own paintings, there is something quite basic about them, which inevitably is to do with their materiality. They are totally non-linguistic. There is no textual support to what you are seeing. Often I am trying to create a numbness. I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words." (Peter Doig cited in: Adrian Searle, Kitty Scoff & Catherine Grenier, Eds., Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 125)

Paiಌnted in soft strokes of oil, the image is articulated by a jagged red matrix of branches that both construct and obscure the image. They force the viewer to contemplate the inherent flatness of the image and its broader relationship to reality; which in turn prompts an examination into the act of looking and the creation of meaning in art through inherently abstract gestures.

Born in Edinburgh, raised in Quebec and trained in London, Peter Doig is today regarded as one of the most influential and important painters of the present day. Recently the recipient of a major retrospective at Tate Britain, his work has revived painting and proven it to be an unrivalled medium in capturing the complexities of life in the 21^st century.