Albert Camus: ‘Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.’

Faurschou Foundation will present the first solo exhibition in China dedicated to one of the most important painters of our time, Peter Doig. Curated by Francis Outred, ‘Cabins and Canoes: The Unreasonable Silence of the World’; is a tightly-curated selection of the painter’s signature motifs: cabins and canoes. The exhibition will feature some of Doig’s most celebrated paintings including, Swamped (1990), The Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991), and Daytime Astronomy (1997-8). The paintings will be juxtaposed with excerpts from Albert Camus’ writings to question the condition of human experience as explored in Doig’s practice.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue containing a complete survey of Doig’s series of ‘Cabins’ and ‘Canoes’, as well as texts by Francis Outred, Anna Campbell and the renowned artist Zeng Fanzhi.

Doig’s itinerant past, moving throughout his childhood and early adult life from Edinburgh to Trinidad and then Canada to London, finds a keen expression in two consistent strands of imagery in his work: cabins and canoes. For Doig, these motifs are more than recollections of his travels. They are the vehicles through which he seeks to dramatize the workings of memory itself.

A centrepiece of the exhibition Daytime Astronomy (1997-98) captures a moment of profound revelation: as a seventeen-year-old boy, working on Canada’s wide-open Western plains, it is the moment that the artist first became aware of the void that separates man from the world around him. A symphony in paint, the surface of Daytime Astronomy projects the hallucinogenic experience of not only watching the sky – but also of remembering it.

The Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991) depicts the home of architect Eberhard Ziedler, which can be barely glimpsed through an intricate tangle of interlaced branches. The building’s presence is deeply unsettling: an unexpected trace of human life that instils a primal, voyeuristic discomfort in the viewer. The Architect’s Home in the Ravine is like memory itself, a perpetually moving target: one that preys upon our psyche whilst fundamentally resisting all attempts to unravel it.

Like the cabins, the canoes function as metaphors for memory. However, if the cabins embody the human struggle to recapture specific moments, the canoes are vehicles for re-enacting drifting states of consciousness. Swamped (1990) is a shifting boat and its lone inhabitant are subsumed by a swirling painterly vortex that disperses like cloud formations across the surface. The canoe gleams from the midst of lagoon, illuminated by the white glow of moon above. All around it, Doig weaves a surging pool of matter that moves seamlessly between lucid reality and abstract delusion.

About the artist

Peter Doig was born in 1959 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Known as one of the most renowned living painters, he spent most of his childhood in Canada, studied in London, and has settled in Trinidad since 2002. After graduating from the Chelsea College of Art and Design in 1990, Doig’s artistic career was launched after receiving the prestigious Whitechapel Artist Award in 1991 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994. In January 2017 he was the fourth artist to receive the annual Art Icon award at the Whitechapel Gallery in partnership with Swarovski. He has also been the subject of several solo exhibitions including those at the Tate Britain in London in 2008 and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2014. His 2013 solo exhibition ‘No Foreign Lands’ at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, which toured to Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montreal, was universally celebrated, with the Financial Times stating: ‘Anyone interested in the future of painting, and its difficult relationship with tradition, should see this show’. In 2015 his major solo exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art was described by Artforum as ‘a subscription to the singular power of pictures’. Doig currently lives and works in Trinidad, New York and London.

About the curator

Francis Outred is Chairman and Head of Post-War & Contemporary Art, EMERI at Christie’s. After graduating from Chelsea School of Art in 1995, where he was taught by Peter Doig, he went on to curate a number of group exhibitions including ‘Life/Live’ (1997), which toured to museums Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon. At Christie’s he has overseen exhibitions including: ‘House of Cards’ at Waddesdon Manor (2012), ‘When Britain Went Pop’ (2013) which inspired a follow-on exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; ‘Polke/Richter, Richter/Polke’ (2014); The Bad Shepherd’ (2014-2015); and ‘Reflections on the Self’ (2015). Known for his innovative approach to the auction business Francis Outred has been responsible for the consignment and sale of some of the most significant paintings, including Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud, at the time the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.

About Faurschou Foundation

Faurschou Foundation is a privately-owned art institution with a large collection of contemporary art. Its exhibition venues are located in Copenhagen’s North Harbour, Denmark, as well as Beijing’s attractive art district, 798, in China. Faurschou Foundation’s mission is to introduce some of the world’s most acclaimed artists to audiences across the globe. Its collection is in a constant state of development and expansion. Since its establishment in 2011, Faurschou Foundation has quickly attained recognition as a significant art institution, mounting solo exhibitions with works by artists such as Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Shirin Neshat, Gabriel Orozco, Danh Vo, Bill Viola, and Yoko Ono, among others. The foundation also publishes exhibition catalogues, and other scholarly writings on artists, as well as individual art works.

About the exhibition

Dates: 30.03.17 – 24.06.17

Opening: 6PM – 8PM, March 30, 2017

Venue: Faurschou Foundation

Courtesy of the artist and Faurschou Foundation, for further information please visit www.faurschou.com.