Peter Doig's paintings have fetched record-breaking prices at auction, making him one of the most expensive living artists in the world. Yet as the 66-year-old Scottish-born painter prepares for his groundbreaking new exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery, he remains remarkably unfazed by commercial success and focused on his artistic vision that seamlessly blends visual art with music.
Inside Doig's expansive east London studio, the contrast is striking. One section contains the typical chaos of artistic creation – three large-scale works in progress propped against walls, rough preparatory sketches scattered about, and floors covered with paint-smeared rags, brushes, and containers. At the opposite end of the high-ceilinged rectangular space, however, everything is organized and serene, with the calm broken only by music flowing from two powerful speakers housed in giant wooden cabinets nearly six feet tall.
"Pretty impressive, eh?" Doig remarks as the staccato rhythm of a 1960s Jamaican ska instrumental fills the space with propulsive energy. "It doesn't have the bass of a classic reggae sound system, but there's a clarity that creates a different kind of listening experience." The pristine audio quality becomes even more apparent when Doig moves to an adjacent room housing shelves of rare vinyl records, placing an older recording by the gospel harmony group the Swan Silvertones on a vintage record deck that appears to date from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop era.
As he adjusts the controls of an analog valve amplifier, the already stirring song becomes suffused with an almost otherworldly aura. "Record producer Joe Boyd thinks this is one of the most perfect records ever made," Doig explains. "You can hear why." This attention to musical detail and sound quality reflects Doig's deep passion for music, which has become increasingly central to his artistic practice and upcoming exhibition.
Born in Edinburgh, Doig has lived a nomadic life across London, Toronto, Montreal, and most recently spent nearly two decades in Trinidad before returning to London in 2021. His work seems rooted in this restlessness while also reflecting his profound knowledge of art history, referencing masters like Vermeer and Daumier. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1994, and during the 2000s, his work's value skyrocketed on the art market, at one point making him the most expensive living European painter. He was recently named the painting laureate for Japan's Praemium Imperiale 2025, which recognizes artists who have had major international influence on their field.
Despite his commercial success, Doig remains remarkably grounded and open in conversation. Having initially come to discuss his paintings, the conversation naturally shifts to music, finding common ground in a shared love of 1970s reggae, when Jamaican producers like Lee "Scratch" Perry, King Tubby, and Joe Gibbs were reshaping the genre's contours. Classic songs from that golden era will undoubtedly feature in Doig's forthcoming exhibition, "House of Music," at the Serpentine South Gallery, which showcases new and recent work.
Throughout the exhibition's four-month run, selections from Doig's extensive record collection will be played through two analog cinema sound systems similar to the one in his studio. For audiophiles, it's a Klangfilm Bionor analog cinema audio system originally designed by Siemens, who created the first prototype in 1928. This innovative approach to exhibiting art represents a departure from traditional gallery experiences, creating what Doig calls a "deep listening environment."
For the exhibition, Doig has collaborated with Laurence Passera, who rescues and restores sound equipment from derelict cinemas across the UK and beyond. In the exhibition catalog, Passera recalls how his obsession began during an American road trip with maverick actor Vincent Gallo. "He was into leather jackets and motorcycles and psychedelic clothing, and he was also into audio equipment," Passera remembers. "When I was in the US, we used to drive into the middle of nowhere in a pickup, buy this stuff from old cinemas for $50, and then he'd swap it with some collector."
Doig has invited various acquaintances – artists, curators, writers, and musicians – to host a regular Sunday Sound Service as part of the Serpentine show. They will play music of their choice for several hours on an original Western Electric/Bell Labs sound system dating from the late 1920s, when the advent of "talkies" in America required new audio technology. Additionally, a series of programmed evening events will feature special guests including Brian Eno, Dennis Bovell, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Lizzi Bougatsos hosting listening sessions, playing selected tracks, creating audio soundscapes, and discussing their selections.
"It's important to point out that we will not be turning the gallery into a club," Doig emphasizes. "It's more about creating a deep listening environment where people can wander through the gallery spaces, looking at the work and maybe lingering to take in the music. In the past, artists have had exhibitions that featured soundtracks, but this is different, not least because it will be more random and constantly changing. I don't think that's been done before."
When asked if he's nervous about how the experiment will unfold, Doig acknowledges the challenge: "Well, it's certainly a challenge, and we'll have to work it out as we do it. It may also annoy a lot of people who just want to see the art, but there you go. We'll just have to wait and see."
On the day of the studio visit, Doig appears exhausted from working long hours on three new paintings that will serve as the exhibition's centerpiece. A persistent cough punctuates his conversation, exacerbated by sustained exposure to paint fumes. With less than a month until the opening, he admits to being "an inveterate deadline surfer" when it comes to completing paintings. "I'm a bit distracted because I'm so deep in it now," he confesses.
The past few years have been turbulent for the artist. In January 2023, he won a surreal but soul-draining court case that had dragged on since 2013. A Canadian former correctional officer, Robert Fletcher, had attempted to sell a painting he claimed was by Doig, purchased in 1976 for $100 from a prisoner named Peter Doige, who was incarcerated for LSD possession. When Doig objected to the sale, Fletcher and Chicago-based art dealer Peter Bartlow sued him for denying ownership of the painting.
"The whole thing was absurd," Doig says, shaking his head, "but it consumed a huge amount of time and energy, and legal costs exceeded $4 million, which was split with the gallery I was with then. Needless to say, I never served jail time in America for LSD possession, but the burden of proof was on me throughout." At the Chicago trial, Doig produced nine key witnesses, personally covering their travel, hotel accommodation, and food costs for the duration. While he won the case, the $2.53 million awarded is unlikely to materialize. "I'd have to sue, but they have no money," he explains with bemusement. "The Canadians would have just thrown them out of court."
Canada is where the teenage Doig first turned to painting as an antidote to the monotony of working on a gas drilling rig. It was also where he discovered punk music, which precipitated his move from Montreal to London in the early 1980s. After completing a foundation course at Wimbledon College, he was accepted at St. Martin's School of Art and lived the bohemian life in the then-gritty King's Cross area. The Pogues were neighbors, and he socialized with the flamboyant figures of the emerging New Romantic scene. "It was a wild time," he grins. "I even ended up as an extra in a Derek Jarman short film."
His work has always reflected his peripatetic lifestyle while paradoxically exuding a deep sense of place. He made his name in the 1990s with a series of what he now calls his "Canadian paintings" – heightened to the point of hallucinatory renderings of wintry rural landscapes, with outlines of sheds and cabins glimpsed through blurred patinas of snow or twisting trees. One painting was pointedly titled "Blotter," referencing the blotting paper used to carry LSD. In his canoe painting series, spectral figures stare out at viewers as if stranded in an imaginative world that's simultaneously familiar and haunting.
Doig completed an MA at Chelsea School of Art, where he flourished during a time when conceptualism was so fashionable that putting oil on canvas was considered embarrassingly old-fashioned. "Back then, the paintings I made relied heavily on what I would call adjusted memory or even fictional memory, which means I'd find whatever references I could use to make a picture, which tended to be American cinema, fiction, or pop culture," he explains.
By way of illustration, he mentions a 2001 painting called "100 Years Ago," which highlights popular music's pervasive influence on his art. It depicts a bearded, straggly-haired figure crouched in a canoe on a swampy expanse of water. The title comes from a Rolling Stones song, while the image is based on a photograph of southern rock group the Allman Brothers Band. "It was on the inside of a gatefold sleeve of a Duane Allman anthology that came out shortly after he died at 24 in a motorcycle accident," Doig recalls. "As a teenager, I loved his guitar playing, particularly his session work with soul singers like Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin, but the guy in the canoe is actually based on another band member, Berry Oakley. I basically removed all the other musicians from the photo and constructed the painting around him. So the Christ-like figure people often refer to is actually the Allman Brothers Band's bass player."
During the 2000s, Doig's prices soared on the art market. "White Canoe," one of his early signature works, fetched $5.73 million at auction in 2007 – then the highest price paid at auction for a work by a living European artist. In 2017, "Rosedale," a snow-swept landscape, sold for $21 million, and in 2021, "Swamped," another painting from the canoe series, fetched close to $30 million.
Last year, a frustrated Doig told The Guardian that although his combined secondary market sales through 2007 totaled around $380 million, he personally made only $230,000 from original sales. He responds wearily when this topic arises: "To a degree, the secondary market is totally beyond the artist's control because there's this whole other level of dealing that happens once you let a painting go. Anything can happen then. That's just the way it is."
As "House of Music" makes clear, Doig's paintings have assumed increasingly metaphorical resonance since his extended stay in Trinidad in the early 2000s. Having lived there as a child, he returned in 2002 for an eight-week artist residency alongside fellow painters Chris Ofili and Lisa Brice but ended up staying until 2021. His time there precipitated a stylistic shift. "In Trinidad, as an outsider, I was nervous about making pictures about other people's culture. Even though I'd lived there as a child, I was an outsider and had to take time to absorb the culture and life around me."
To this end, he ran a cinema club where music was a vital ingredient of post-screening parties that included local writers, artists, and musicians among its regulars. Does he miss being there? "Sometimes, yes. I do feel like we kind of abandoned Trinidad, but in a way, we had to." In 2019, Doig's first wife, Bonnie Kennedy, died of cancer. The couple had lived together in Port of Spain for 10 years before splitting up, raising their five children there.
"We'd been apart for 10 years but we were close," he says quietly. "Three of our kids were living in Trinidad at the time, but the older kids were in London. Parinaz [Mogadassi, his second wife] and I had two kids then, and we were living between New York and Trinidad. Suddenly everything was upended, and we had to think about where we all should be. Anyway, this is where we've ended up."
When suggested that London doesn't quite sound like home to him, Doig responds: "I've been in and out of London for so many years, and I do like it a lot, but I don't know if it will ever feel like home." It's perhaps unsurprising that Doig's recent paintings continue reflecting his deep engagement with the life he left behind. The Serpentine exhibition's title, "House of Music," comes from a line in a song by Trinidadian soca music star Shadow, whose portrait features in the exhibition.
"All the paintings in the show relate to music in some way, either directly or tangentially," Doig explains. "Many are related to my time in Trinidad, where music is part of everyday life's fabric. It's an island animated by sound. In Port of Spain, coming up to carnival, you can hear distant sounds of steel pans echoing in the night. It's a sensory experience."
One large work titled "Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity PoS)" depicts the exterior of the Prosperity Recreational Club in Port of Spain, which Doig used to frequent. "Wall paintings are everywhere in the city, and they feature prominently in the show," he notes. "In this instance, the guy was painting flags, mainly from African countries, but he seems to have stopped when he got bored."
Intriguingly, the three large paintings he's currently working on all feature lions at their center. They relate to an earlier work, "Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak)," which depicts a lion prowling around the town's jail and serves as a metaphor for freedom and entrapment. Lion paintings are constant features of Trinidad murals, but given his fondness for Jamaican music, is he also drawing on Rastafarian reggae iconography, where the lion represents freedom and spiritual strength?
"Yes, and the lion is a symbol of resistance throughout Africa too," he confirms. "I'm not a political painter, but the work alludes to the idea of resistance in an indirect way. It seems particularly resonant to acknowledge that given what's happening in the world right now."
As if on cue, Parinaz Mogadassi arrives. She has represented Doig since 2023, when he parted company with Michael Werner, who had been his gallerist for over 20 years. A founder of Tramps gallery in New York and former Werner gallery employee, she is animated, fiercely opinionated, and refreshingly outspoken on various subjects, particularly the art world's cliquishness and artists' and curators' reluctance to speak out on Gaza. They make quite a pair.
"Parinaz does her own thing," Doig explains during a follow-up phone conversation. "She is in the art world but not of it. The whole social side, parties, and networking doesn't interest her." Mogadassi's attitude aligns with his own philosophy. "I've always been independently minded. I've never felt the need to cash in on my success by hiring loads of studio assistants and going into overproduction. That kind of model doesn't interest me. I don't actually make very much work, but I'm in a fortunate position in that I've had a successful career and have people who want to buy my paintings. I've also kept many paintings too."
When asked if he feels less pressure to produce work now, Doig reflects: "Well, I'm 66, so there's only so much time left. To be honest, I never felt great pressure from the galleries I worked with, but there was always an obligation to sell paintings. My feeling now is that I can sell a painting when I need to, and if someone wants to buy one, they can find a way." That, he says with a smile, "is a pretty good place to be."
Peter Doig's "House of Music" runs at the Serpentine South Gallery in London from October 10, 2025, to February 8, 2026, promising to redefine how audiences experience art through the innovative integration of visual and auditory elements.
