Peter Doig
2019-23
Pigment on linen
250 x 200 cm
This monumentally scaled young man on the shore is a recurring figure in Peter Doig’s recent work. The subject recalls the male bathers of Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch and the American artist Marsden Hartley. However, for Doig, the figure first sprang from a black-and-white photograph of the actor Robert Mitchum posing on a beach in 1942. Mitchum later spent time filming in Trinidad and, in 1957, released a calypso album in the United States.
Doig recasts the figure as eerily frozen in time and out of place, dressed for summer but set amidst a seascape that is cold and crystalline. The painting gives a sense of dislocation, which is often a feature of Doig’s work