Engravings

After studying art in England in the early 1980s, British artist Peter Doig began painting large canvases depicting landscapes devoid of any human figures. Influenced by 19th-century German painting and the naturalistic work of Edward Hopper, his compositions are often created using photographic elements from popular culture (record sleeves, advertisements, magazines, postcards, film images). Doig moved to Trinidad in 2001, a place he had visited as a child, and whose landscapes left a deep impression on him. Pelican Island depicts a calm body of water where an empty canoe can be seen, surrounded by mountains and above which soar oversized pelicans. A reworking of a painting he created in 2004, this print, in which the pelicans' silhouettes, the outlines of the mountains and the waves are deeply etched, exudes a sense of strangeness reinforced by the aquatic hue of the ink.