DALLAS, TEXAS.-This fall the Dallas Museum of Art will host the first museum exhibition dedicated to contemporary painter Peter Doig’s works on paper. Peter Doig: Works on Paper, which includes more than 50 works, is on view through Nov. 20. Short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1994, the artist became well known in the British art scene for using traditional materials to portray haunting images.

More modest in scale than the artist’s large paintings, his works on paper are created using a variety of media such as oil, watercolor, pastels and charcoal. In these pieces depict Doig’s mysterious settings and a solitary cast of characters—lonely figures, placid lakes, vivid seashores and lush forest scenes—often leading to comparisons with the early 20th-century painters of the symbolist and the surrealist movements.

“Peter Doig has been credited in part with a revival of the Romantic spirit in painting,” said Charles Wylie, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art of the Dallas Museum of Art. “The artist himself has named Hopper, Munch and Matisse among his inspirations.”

Doig’s imagery is inspired by sources that are both high and low, such as photographs, postcards, film stills, paintings and album covers. The artist revisits these images repeatedly in his painting and works on paper. Other influences on his work are drawn from his own experiences and fantasies. While some refer to Doig as a painter of landscapes, the location of his scenes is always ambiguous, occupying what the artist calls “nowhere places.”

In addition to the exhibition, the Dallas Museum of Art will display Doig’s House of Pictures (2004), a painting generously loaned as a promised gift by DMA patrons Gayle and Paul Stoffel.

About the Artist - Edinburgh-born Doig spent much of his childhood in Trinidad and Canada, later earning degrees in London from St. Martin’s School of Art in 1983 and the Chelsea School of Art in 1990. He became a central figure in Britain’s high-profile art scene, dominated at the time by the provocative YBAs (Young British Artists). Unlike many of these artists who chose to break with traditional materials, Doig became known for his signature atmospheric oil paintings and evocative works on paper.

Doig’s first solo exhibition in North America was in 2000 at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and traveled to the Saint Louis Art Museum. More recently, the Pinakotek der Moderne organized a solo exhibition of his paintings and works on paper in 2004 entitled Metropolitain. A group of his paintings was also presented earlier this year in Part I of The Triumph of Painting at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The artist’s work is in the permanent collections of the Tate, The Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Exhibition Organizer - Peter Doig: Works on Paper is curated by Kadee Robbins for The Gallery at Windsor in Vero Beach, Florida, and the presentation in Dallas is being coordinated by Charles Wylie, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art. Lenders to the exhibition include international private collectors and institutions as well as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the British Council, London.

Exhibition Support - Exhibition support is provided by the Contemporary Art Fund through the gifts of an anonymous donor, Naomi Aberly and Laurence Lebowitz, Arlene and John Dayton, Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Faulconer, Nancy and Tim Hanley, The Hoffman Family Foundation, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, Evelyn P. and Edward W. Rose, and Gayle and Paul Stoffel, and by the Donor Circle Membership Program through a leadership gift of Fanchon and Howard Hallam. Air transportation is provided by American Airlines.