Artist to make £21m killing
AN oil painting by the Scottish artist Peter Doig, inspired by the classic horror film Friday the 13th, is expected to fetch more than £21 million at auction next month.
Edinburgh-born Doig, 62, painted Swamped in 1990, just before he graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design and won the prestigious Whitechapel Artist Prize.
The 6ftx8ft oil painting on canvas, depicting a solitary canoe on water, surrounded by trees, is one of a series of canoe artworks born out of a dream sequence in the 1980 slasher movie featuring the fictional killer Jason Voorhees.
In the famous scene, Jason shoots out of the water to grab his only survivor, and she wakes up later in hospital to find it was just a dream.
Doig’s masterpiece will be a highlight of the Christie’s New York Marquee Week next month, and features in the auction house’s 21st Century Art Evening Sale. Described as an ‘icon of contemporary art’, Swamped was last sold at Christie’s New York in 2015 for $25.9 million (£19.1 milion), a record for the artist at the time.
Christie’s experts say it is now ‘poised to break the artist’s current record of $28.8 million (£21.3 million), set in 2017 for his 1991 canvas Rosedale, showing a Toronto snowfall.
Ana Maria Celis, senior specialist in 21st Century art at Christie’s, said: ‘Standing as a leading work within his highly celebrated canoe series, Swamped brilliantly showcases Peter Doig’s singular and unique ability to manipulate the materiality of oil paint to render masterful compositions that exist on the border of figuration and abstraction.’
Doig, now one of the world’s most sought-after living artists, was born in Edinburgh in 1959 but moved with his family to Canada as a child.
He returned to Britain to study art, before moving to Trinidad, where he has lived since 2002.