Peter Doig Scottish, 1959
Buffalo Station II, 1997-1998
Oil on canvas
175.3 x 269.9 cm. (69 1/8 x 106 1/4 in.)
Copyright The Artist
Further images
Buffalo Station II is one of three works the artist made of this subject and belongs to the group of large-scale landscape canvases Peter Doig produced through the 1990s that...
Buffalo Station II is one of three works the artist made of this subject and belongs to the group of large-scale landscape canvases Peter Doig produced through the 1990s that established his international reputation. The present work is typical Doig in its conflation of personal memory and visual reference to create an atmospheric, dreamlike blend that makes the work feel proto-nostalgic, so much so that it is about memory itself.
The painting is the pendant to Buffalo Station I, the two canvases sharing the same large scale. Both were included in Doig's first institutional exhibition, Peter Doig: Blizzard Seventy-Seven, which travelled to the Kunsthalle Kiel, the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, between March and August 1998.
The exhibition's title points to the subject that had preoccupied Doig through the decade: snow, treated as a matter of memory rather than direct depiction. Two sources inspired the present work: the infamous blizzard of 28 January 1977, which engulfed Buffalo, New York, and a Rolling Stones concert held at the city's Rich Stadium on 4 July 1978. Doig, then nineteen, was in the crowd. The paintings show no trace of the concert itself — no stage, band or audience signage — only the stadium exterior and the crowd dispersing afterwards, so that the image reads as either the lead-up to an event or its aftermath. The composition is based on two photographs taken by a friend of the artist as the crowd left the stadium, which together form a continuous panorama of the venue. The work shows the artist's mature style fully formed and presents a panoramic, dreamlike approach to landscape, built up in layers of diffuse, atmospheric paint and drawn from a personal photographic archive rather than direct observation.
Seen side by side, Buffalo Station I and II form a double image rather than two independent views: recurring details across the two canvases — the evenly spaced floodlights, the pitch of the stadium roof, the placement of trees and windows — are closely aligned rather than identical, so that the second painting reads as a near-mirror of the first. Doig used this device, of returning to the same composition more than once, across several major paintings of the mid-to-late 1990s — sometimes through a reflection within a single canvas, sometimes through a second version of an existing subject — giving these images the déjà vu quality of a scene revisited rather than seen for the first time. Of the effect, Doig has said that “the mirroring opened up another world” (Peter Doig, quoted in Judith Nesbitt, 'A Suitable Distance', in Peter Doig, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2008, p. 14).
The painting is the pendant to Buffalo Station I, the two canvases sharing the same large scale. Both were included in Doig's first institutional exhibition, Peter Doig: Blizzard Seventy-Seven, which travelled to the Kunsthalle Kiel, the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, between March and August 1998.
The exhibition's title points to the subject that had preoccupied Doig through the decade: snow, treated as a matter of memory rather than direct depiction. Two sources inspired the present work: the infamous blizzard of 28 January 1977, which engulfed Buffalo, New York, and a Rolling Stones concert held at the city's Rich Stadium on 4 July 1978. Doig, then nineteen, was in the crowd. The paintings show no trace of the concert itself — no stage, band or audience signage — only the stadium exterior and the crowd dispersing afterwards, so that the image reads as either the lead-up to an event or its aftermath. The composition is based on two photographs taken by a friend of the artist as the crowd left the stadium, which together form a continuous panorama of the venue. The work shows the artist's mature style fully formed and presents a panoramic, dreamlike approach to landscape, built up in layers of diffuse, atmospheric paint and drawn from a personal photographic archive rather than direct observation.
Seen side by side, Buffalo Station I and II form a double image rather than two independent views: recurring details across the two canvases — the evenly spaced floodlights, the pitch of the stadium roof, the placement of trees and windows — are closely aligned rather than identical, so that the second painting reads as a near-mirror of the first. Doig used this device, of returning to the same composition more than once, across several major paintings of the mid-to-late 1990s — sometimes through a reflection within a single canvas, sometimes through a second version of an existing subject — giving these images the déjà vu quality of a scene revisited rather than seen for the first time. Of the effect, Doig has said that “the mirroring opened up another world” (Peter Doig, quoted in Judith Nesbitt, 'A Suitable Distance', in Peter Doig, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2008, p. 14).
