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Lot 56
Peter Doig (b. 1959)
Briey (Interior)
Closed12 November 2014
Estimate
USD 5,000,000–7,000,000
More Information
Peter Doig (b. 1959)
Briey (Interior)
signed and dated 'Peter Doig '99' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
98 1/2 x 76 3/4 in. (250.1 x 194.9 cm.)
Painted in 1999.
Briey (Interior)
signed and dated 'Peter Doig '99' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
98 1/2 x 76 3/4 in. (250.1 x 194.9 cm.)
Painted in 1999.
Peter Doig (b. 1959)
Briey (Interior)
signed and dated 'Peter Doig '99' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
98 1/2 x 76 3/4 in. (250.1 x 194.9 cm.)
Painted in 1999.
Briey (Interior)
signed and dated 'Peter Doig '99' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
98 1/2 x 76 3/4 in. (250.1 x 194.9 cm.)
Painted in 1999.
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York
Private collection, New York
Michael Werner Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Private collection, New York
Michael Werner Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
A. Searle; K. Scott and C. Grenier, Peter Doig, London, 2007, pp. 82-83 and 158 (illustrated in color).
London, Tate Britain; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Peter Doig, February 2008-January 2009, pp. 63 and 156 (illustrated in color).
Peter Doig’s Briey Interior is the culmination of a decade long relationship that the artist had with Unite d’Habitation de Briey-en-Forêt, a building built in the 1960s by the famous modernist architect, Le Corbusier. The apartment block, located in north eastern France, is a version of the architect’s famous Unite d’Habitation in Marseille and was abandoned after only a decade of occupation and left to be subsumed by the surrounding forest. When Doig first encountered the building, he was immediately struck by the contrast of the strict formality of this modernist structure, set against the natural backdrop of the trees. Over the next 10 years, he produced what would become one of his most important series of paintings, all containing images of the building shrouded by the forest and permeated with his intriguing balance of figuration and abstract surface qualities. Briey Interior is the final installment in this group of works, and one which reveals a hitherto underrepresented area of Doig’s work as the artist finally takes us inside the building’s interior, revealing the heart of iconic series of paintings.
A rare example of Doig’s paintings that depicts an interior instead of an exterior, the present work still displays the artist’s astute pictorial understandings on creating atmosphere through form and color. Here, instead of being positioned outside the building wondering what wonders await us, Doig has invited us inside to witness an aspect of the building that up until this work, he has denied us. He composes an interior scene that although appears sparse, becomes deeply atmospheric as we are left wondering why this beautiful space has been abandoned and what lies ahead for its future. Framed by a large floor-to-ceiling window, the interior is bathed in a warm natural half-light, which falls across a checkerboard effect floor made up of subtle pastel shades of yellow, blue, green and pink. Protruding down into this space is a large staircase, which leads the eye to wander up to the light emanating from above, taking us into another world, hidden from view. Despite its poetic beauty however, Briey Interior also displays an sense of foreboding as evidenced in the paint peeling from the dark, water stained ceiling and in the long shadows cast by the light from upstairs across the desolate and empty room. Despite the onset of decay, there is still something resolutely beautiful about this image, its formal geometry matched only by Doig’s masterful ability to create atmospheric narratives in each of his paintings.
Doig’s association with Unite d’Habitation de Briey-en-Forêt began when the artist was taken to see the building and recalls the sense of apprehension when he realized that what he thought was a clearing in the woods was in fact the bright, white, façade of this modernist structure. That sense of amazement is displayed in the first painting in this series, Concrete Cabin, 1991-92, in which Doig reproduces the building’s bright flashes of exterior primary color piercing through the somber curtain of dark, heavily forested trees. “As Doig’s experience of the building shifted from welcoming to threatening, it may have seemed that the dramatic play of light and dark was altering his mood,” Richard Shiff writes in his catalogue text for Doig’s retrospective at the Tate. “ Perhaps, instead, the play of light responded to the painter’s subtle emotional shifts, in tacit dialogue with his involving perception—the momentary image of the building growing from an incidental seed of virtual memory” (R. Shiff, “Incidents,” in J. Nesbitt (ed.), Peter Doig, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2008, pp.37-38).
“With the Corbusier/Briey paintings,” Doig said, “I was trying to depict the movement of the eye—not to paint a still [sic]. The eye never sees a ‘still’” (P. Doig, ibid.). In Briery Interior he achieves this in a number of ways, initially by laying down the parallel lines which are etched into the floor that lead us into the scene, a journey which is only halted by the large frosted windows preventing us from seeing through to the other side. Forced to remain in the room, our eye is then guided up the dilapidated stairs in a bid to seek solace on another floor. For this series of paintings Doig often worked from photographs, taking a number of images of each particular scene or viewpoint which he would then use as the basis of his paintings. However, instead of using them as a traditional study to copy from, Doig used to glance at the images before committing paint to canvas. He was particularly attracted to the blurring effect produced by using a handheld camera in low light, and often used this effect to represent the instability of his experience of the Unite and its surroundings. He then captured these movements within his paintings, a technique that produced what he called “handmade and homely looking”, “beautiful but slightly repellent" (Ibid).
Conceived as an ideal living space and opened in 1961, the apartment block fell into disrepair and was derelict by 1973, a result perhaps of the fall from grace of Le Corbusier’s revolutionary style of building design or, more probably, a downturn in the local economy. In the early 1990s, tastes had changed once again and the building underwent a renewal as it was subsequently reclaimed for habitation and in the early 1990s Doig became actively involved with a group of architects and artists who used the building as both living and studio space.
In his paintings from the period, 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. Here, in Briey Interior, Doig’s insistence on the bold use of color, pattern and strong verticals and horizontals produces an almost abstract effect. This adds to the sense of abandonment as “The idylls of nature and the utopian dreams of modernism are crumbling in to disharmonious, brooding decay. …it seems that we are confronted with several degrees of abstraction, where Doig had to paint in several antithetical ways in order to realize the geometric planes of the building” (A. Searle, “A Kind of Blankness,” Peter Doig, London, 2007, p. 83).
Just as the former occupants of this room have long moved on, much of Peter Doig’s work has operated through a process of displacement, chronicling his own experiences of travel and relocation. As Adrian Searle once commented, “journey’s real and metaphorical, places of arrival and departure, no-man’s lands between waking and sleeping, and the slippage between the present and the past, the real and the imaginary, are the territories of Doig’s art” (A. Searle, ‘A Kind of Blankness’ in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London, 2007, p. 52).
A rare example of Doig’s paintings that depicts an interior instead of an exterior, the present work still displays the artist’s astute pictorial understandings on creating atmosphere through form and color. Here, instead of being positioned outside the building wondering what wonders await us, Doig has invited us inside to witness an aspect of the building that up until this work, he has denied us. He composes an interior scene that although appears sparse, becomes deeply atmospheric as we are left wondering why this beautiful space has been abandoned and what lies ahead for its future. Framed by a large floor-to-ceiling window, the interior is bathed in a warm natural half-light, which falls across a checkerboard effect floor made up of subtle pastel shades of yellow, blue, green and pink. Protruding down into this space is a large staircase, which leads the eye to wander up to the light emanating from above, taking us into another world, hidden from view. Despite its poetic beauty however, Briey Interior also displays an sense of foreboding as evidenced in the paint peeling from the dark, water stained ceiling and in the long shadows cast by the light from upstairs across the desolate and empty room. Despite the onset of decay, there is still something resolutely beautiful about this image, its formal geometry matched only by Doig’s masterful ability to create atmospheric narratives in each of his paintings.
Doig’s association with Unite d’Habitation de Briey-en-Forêt began when the artist was taken to see the building and recalls the sense of apprehension when he realized that what he thought was a clearing in the woods was in fact the bright, white, façade of this modernist structure. That sense of amazement is displayed in the first painting in this series, Concrete Cabin, 1991-92, in which Doig reproduces the building’s bright flashes of exterior primary color piercing through the somber curtain of dark, heavily forested trees. “As Doig’s experience of the building shifted from welcoming to threatening, it may have seemed that the dramatic play of light and dark was altering his mood,” Richard Shiff writes in his catalogue text for Doig’s retrospective at the Tate. “ Perhaps, instead, the play of light responded to the painter’s subtle emotional shifts, in tacit dialogue with his involving perception—the momentary image of the building growing from an incidental seed of virtual memory” (R. Shiff, “Incidents,” in J. Nesbitt (ed.), Peter Doig, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2008, pp.37-38).
“With the Corbusier/Briey paintings,” Doig said, “I was trying to depict the movement of the eye—not to paint a still [sic]. The eye never sees a ‘still’” (P. Doig, ibid.). In Briery Interior he achieves this in a number of ways, initially by laying down the parallel lines which are etched into the floor that lead us into the scene, a journey which is only halted by the large frosted windows preventing us from seeing through to the other side. Forced to remain in the room, our eye is then guided up the dilapidated stairs in a bid to seek solace on another floor. For this series of paintings Doig often worked from photographs, taking a number of images of each particular scene or viewpoint which he would then use as the basis of his paintings. However, instead of using them as a traditional study to copy from, Doig used to glance at the images before committing paint to canvas. He was particularly attracted to the blurring effect produced by using a handheld camera in low light, and often used this effect to represent the instability of his experience of the Unite and its surroundings. He then captured these movements within his paintings, a technique that produced what he called “handmade and homely looking”, “beautiful but slightly repellent" (Ibid).
Conceived as an ideal living space and opened in 1961, the apartment block fell into disrepair and was derelict by 1973, a result perhaps of the fall from grace of Le Corbusier’s revolutionary style of building design or, more probably, a downturn in the local economy. In the early 1990s, tastes had changed once again and the building underwent a renewal as it was subsequently reclaimed for habitation and in the early 1990s Doig became actively involved with a group of architects and artists who used the building as both living and studio space.
In his paintings from the period, 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. Here, in Briey Interior, Doig’s insistence on the bold use of color, pattern and strong verticals and horizontals produces an almost abstract effect. This adds to the sense of abandonment as “The idylls of nature and the utopian dreams of modernism are crumbling in to disharmonious, brooding decay. …it seems that we are confronted with several degrees of abstraction, where Doig had to paint in several antithetical ways in order to realize the geometric planes of the building” (A. Searle, “A Kind of Blankness,” Peter Doig, London, 2007, p. 83).
Just as the former occupants of this room have long moved on, much of Peter Doig’s work has operated through a process of displacement, chronicling his own experiences of travel and relocation. As Adrian Searle once commented, “journey’s real and metaphorical, places of arrival and departure, no-man’s lands between waking and sleeping, and the slippage between the present and the past, the real and the imaginary, are the territories of Doig’s art” (A. Searle, ‘A Kind of Blankness’ in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London, 2007, p. 52).
This Lot is Withdrawn.