Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre

Peter Doig creates dreamlike, psychologically charged landscapes that display a peculiar blend of abstraction and representation. Combining a hallucinatory palette with expressionist brushwork, his paintings have a mysterious, often melancholic air. Doig works exclusively from found images, drawing inspiration from film stills, newspaper clippings, personal photo albums, record album covers, and the work of earlier artists such as Edvard Munch and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The image of the two men in Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre derives from a photograph taken when the artist was working as a dresser at the London Coliseum. One night, after a production of Igor Stravinsky’s burlesque ballet Petrouchka (1911), Doig and a friend donned costumes from the performance and comically posed for a snapshot. The artist initially used the photo as the basis for a figure study; he then superimposed the two figures on a landscape he borrowed from an antique postcard, which depicts the vista from an old German tavern, Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre. In Doig’s version, the view has undergone strange chromatic shifts, resulting in a fantastical, nocturnal scene that resembles a theatrical backdrop. The men at the gate are an otherworldly presence; the winding path behind them seems to lead to another realm beyond the edge of the painting.