Peter Doig – An invitation to travel

Nature, as seen by Peter Doig, is an invitation to enter the mirror. On the other side, a journey through the subconscious… The collector Charles Saatchi, known to the public for his promotion of morbid works by the Young British Artists, is also an owner of Doig’s chimerical paintings, which resulted in an immediate escalation of the artist’s price index.

When Saatchi held his Triumph of Painting exhibition in 2005, Peter DOIG’s paintings (generally measuring 2 to 3 metres) were already fetching more than €100,000 at auctions. At the time, Doig’s best auction result came from a work entitled Swamped, a peaceful painting of a white canoe floating on unreal colours. The theme of the canoe appeared for the first time in 1987. It was apparently inspired by a photograph that Doig took of the final scene of Sean Cunningham’s horror film Friday the 13th on his television. The canoe is a symbol of transition and, by metonymy, of death. It has become one of Doig’s emblematic themes for which collectors have pushed the bidding far beyond the estimated range. On 7 February 2002 in London, Swamped fetched three times its estimate for a final hammer price of £290,000 (€472,000). But it was the Triumph of Painting exhibition in 2005 that had the biggest impact on his auction prices. In effect, the organiser and curator of that exhibition, former advertising mogul and super-collector Charles Saatchi, has long been a trendsetter at the core of the contemporary art scene. His choices have effectively dictated the market and he has already played a key role in boosting the prices of a number of British artists like Damien HIRST and the brothers Dinos & Jake CHAPMAN. Peter Doig has also benefited from Saatchi’s patronage. After the exhibition, on 11 May 2006, his painting Olin MK IV fetched $950,000 (€743,000) at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York, just below the million-dollar line.

The following month Doig crossed into 7 figures with his Iron Hill, a disturbing landscape measuring nearly 3 metres. Estimated at £400,000 to £600,000 by Sotheby’s, the painting fetched £1m (€1.46m on 21 June 2006). Eight months later, Sotheby’s generated a much better result when Doig’s White Canoe fetched five times the estimate at £5.1 m (€7.74m). White Canoe comes from the same series as Swamped, which was Doig’s first work to approach the €500,000 line. The painting depicts the same subject in roughly the same indefinite surroundings. It was exhibited in 1991 at the Serpentine Gallery in London and acquired the same year by a private collector. Despite its resemblance to Swamped, its hammer price on 7 February 2007 was 16 times the amount the buyer paid for it. However, this result has remained exceptional. 2007 being a particularly speculative year, Doig’s works generated seven results above the million-dollar line and an annual auction total of €21.6m. As the global Contemporary art market contracted in 2008, so Doig’s market deflated. However, in 2009 it recovered with five 7-figure results during the year including a superb result for Reflection (What does your soul look like) which fetched $9m (€6m) on 11 October at Christie’s.

With sustained demand and high prices it has become impossible to acquire any of his substantial works for less than €300,000. When good, his small format works measuring not more than 30 centimetres fetch €50,000 in auctions (Country Rock at Piasa on 10 June 2008).
On 11 and 12 May 2010 Christie’s and Sotheby’s are each presenting one piece by the artist in their Contemporary Art sales. Christie’s is offering Figure in the Snow, an oil-on-canvas measuring 55.8 x 25.4 cm and estimated at $100,000 – $150,000. Sotheby’s has priced a long fresco entitled Drifter (243 cm wide) in a cautious range of $350,000 – $450,000. On 2 July 2008 in London, Drifter changed hands for the equivalent of $538,380.

37% of Doig’s auction lots that sell for less than €5,000 are Polaroids and prints. For example, the same subject as Country Rock in photo-engraving format and aquatint sells for between €3,000 and €5,000. It is ten times less expensive than the original painting… but edited in 46 copies, and it doesn’t have the magic of a unique piece or the chimerical impact of the painting. There are some 300 lithographs that are accessible for between €1,000 and €2,000. In that format, it is best to give preference to his fetish theme… the canoe.