Christie's will auction Peter Doig's "Swamped"
Peter Doig - Swamped - 1991
Next November, Christie's will auction "Swamped", one of Peter Doig's most important works, which could fetch more than $35 million.
Source: Christie's. Image: Peter Doig, "Swamped" (1990). Oil on canvas, 77 1/2 x 95 in. (197 x 241 cm.). ©Peter Doig.
Described by Christie's as a "painterly fantasy all sense of depth and surface, distance and proximity, materiality and illusion have been lost, the landscape transforming before us as if in a dream", "Swamped" is one of the most famous works by Peter Doig, the Scottish painter born in 1959 who is widely recognized as one of the most relevant artists of his generation.
Although it is possibly too early to make an assessment of Doig's career, it seems that his paintings created in the early 1990s constitute the highlights of his oeuvre. The current auction record for the artist is held by "Rosedale", a 1991 painting auctioned in 2017 at Phillips for $28.8 million, surpassing the previous record of "Swamped" (1990), which had reached $25.9 million in 2015 at Christie's, a record that could now be regained. A case worth commenting on is "The Architect's Home in the Ravine", another 1991 painting -an extraordinary work, perhaps the most powerful among all Doig's paintings- which reached £11.3 million at Christie's in 2016 and was sold at Sotheby's two years later for £14.4 million (about $20 million). Last year, "Concrete Cabin," painted in 1993, was auctioned for £13.9 million at Christie's (about $18 million)
"Swamped," like Doig's other paintings depicting a lone canoe on a lake, has its origins in an iconic image from popular culture, that of the final scene of the movie "Friday the 13th," in which the "final girl" takes refuge in a canoe in the middle of Crystal Lake, fleeing the mysterious killer who had been chasing her all night.

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