BIOGRAPHY

Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh on April 17th, 1959, he lives and works between London, New York, and Trinidad. In 1962, he moved with his family to Trinidad (Cuba) where his father worked for a shipping and trading company, and later, four years after, to Canada. In 1979-80, he moved to London to begin his studies at the Wimbledon School of Art. From 1980 to 1983, he studied at the Saint Martin's School of Art (where he met artist Billy Childish). In 1989-90, he graduated from the Chelsea School of Art. Also in 1989, Peter got a part-time job as a costume figure for the English National Opera along with his friend Haydn Cottam. In 2000, the artist was invited to return to Trinidad to take up an artist residency with his colleague and friend, painter Chris Ofili.

Following his graduation in 1991, he was given the opportunity to hold his solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. This occasion stimulated Peter greatly, and he went through an intense period of creativity, producing a small number of large canvases that he now sees as the thematic matrix for his future works. Large works were included in the Whitechampel exhibition such as Swamped (1990), Iron Hill (1991), and The Architect's Home in the Ravine (1991). Peter is best known for his series of paintings of modernist apartments for communal living by Le Corbusier, also known as the Unité d'Habitation located in Briey-en-Forêt, France.

In the early 1990s, the artist was involved in a group of architects and artists who worked from the building. The modern urban structures are partly revealed and hidden by the forest that surrounds them. As Peter said:

"When you walk through an urban environment, you take the strangeness of architecture for granted."

 In the late 1990s, he created a series of paintings depicting a tunnel, which was also a familiar landmark for the citizens of Toronto since an anonymous artist painted a rainbow on it in 1972 north of Don Valley Parkway. The rainbow was painted more than 40 times over two decades, despite attempts by authorities to remove them.

In 1993, he won the first prize at the John Moores exhibition with his painting Blotter, and this brought him great public recognition, cemented in 1994 when he was nominated for the Turner Prize. In 2002, Peter opened a studio at the Caribbean Contemporary Arts Center near Port of Spain. He also took up the teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, Germany. From 1995 to 2000, he was an administrator at the Tate Gallery. In 2009, he was honored with the amfAR Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS.