Peter Doig
Concrete Cabin 1991–2
Oil on canvas
Leicester Arts and Museums Service © courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro Gallery,London
Peter Doig
Concrete Cabin II 1992
Oil on canvas
© Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Peter Doig
Cabin Essence 1993–4
Oil on canvas
Private collection © Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery,London
Peter Doig
Boiler House 1994
Oil on canvas
Collection of Ken and Judy Siebel; promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London
This room brings together a group of paintings on the same theme; although shown here as a series, they were in fact made several years apart, between 1991 and 1999. The first was prompted by Doig’s visit to the Unité d’Habitation apartments in Briey-en-Forêt, north east France – one of several such visionary postwar projects designed by the modernist architect Le Corbusier.
Conceived as an ideal living space and opened in 1961, the apartment block fell into disrepair and was derelict by 1973, until subsequently reclaimed for habitation. In the early 1990s Doig was involved with a group of architects and artists who operated from the building. He used a handheld video camera to capture the disorientating experience of moving through the surrounding woods towards the building, and worked from the still images which he captured. In his paintings, the architecture appears and disappears within the screen of branches, so that foreground and background are held together in tension, opening up the drama within the surface of the painting.