Peter Doig (b. 1959, Edinburgh) is a Scottish painter renowned for his dreamlike, evocative landscapes that blend personal memory with cultural references. Raised in Trinidad and Canada, Doig’s work draws on the visual and emotional atmospheres of both regions—snow-covered forests, isolated cabins, tropical jungles, and luminous beaches—rendered with a lush, painterly sensibility that invites both intimacy and mystery.

Doig studied at the Wimbledon School of Art, Saint Martin’s School of Art, and completed his MA at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 1990. That same year, he won the Whitechapel Artist Prize, leading to a solo exhibition featuring key early works such as Swamped (1990) and The Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991). Often working from photographs, postcards, and film stills, Doig resists photorealism, instead painting “by proxy” to capture a mood or atmosphere rather than a direct likeness.

Since 2002, Doig lived and worked in Trinidad for nearly two decades, where he co-founded StudioFilmClub and maintained a studio near Port of Spain. He was also a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf until 2017. In 2021, he returned to London, where he continues to live and work.

Doig’s major exhibitions include retrospectives at Tate Britain, Fondation Beyeler, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and the Scottish National Gallery. In 2023, he became the first contemporary artist to exhibit at the Courtauld Gallery following its redevelopment, and in 2024, his work was the subject of two exhibitions at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Today, Peter Doig is widely regarded as one of the most important painters of his generation, admired for his technical mastery and rich, transportive imagery.

“ It's as if memories suddenly spring up from the place I have just left and I have to work through them to get to that elsewhere. „

—Peter Doig