In celebration of Peter Doig’s 67th birthday week, we are taking a closer look at Alpinist, a 2023 work that brings together many of the qualities that have made the artist one of the most distinctive painters of his generation. The painting turns the language of the ski poster into something stranger, depicting a lone skier in harlequin checks edging across an icy ledge, red skis strapped in a cross on his back, while the Matterhorn rises over a deep white valley behind him. But despite being shaped by the imagery that informed Doig’s time in Zermatt, the scene is far from a straightforward Alpine idyll. The mountain is split between sunlight and shadow, the figure is vivid but solitary, and the whole composition carries the subtle tension that gives so much of Doig’s work its charge. Made after a painting created between 2019 and 2022, Alpinist reflects the artist’s ability to transform lived places into images suspended between memory and imagination, turning a winter landscape into something elusive and faintly haunting.

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