London – Christie‘s Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction will present Peter Doig’s Cobourg 3 + 1 More (1994, estimate: £8,000,000-12,000,000), which stands among the great icons of Doig’s early oeuvre.  A visionary apparition rendered on a majestic scale, Cobourg 3 + 1 More conjures a distant, half-remembered reality beneath a shimmering membrane of scattered pigment. Recently awarded the Art Icon Award at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Peter Doig placed himself in the Canadian landscape of his youth next to his brother. Acquired in 1994 by German insurance company Provinzial Rheinland Cobourg 3 + 1 More comes to auction for the first time in its history and will be exhibited at Christie’s New York from 24 to 26 February and at Christie’s King Street from 3 March as part of the 20th-Century series of sales ahead of the auction on 7 March 2017 in London.

Provinzial Rheinland will use the proceeds of the sale to uphold a long-standing tradition of engagement with the arts and culture in the Rhine region whilst also continuing to acquire the works of young contemporary artists, a focus of the corporate collection from its inception.

Dr. Walter Tesarczyk, Chairman Provinzial Rheinland: “It is with a heavy heart that we part with Peter Doig‘s Cobourg 3 + 1 More. However, this sale presents us with the opportunity to maintain our support for arts and culture in the Rhine region and also enables us to secure and expand our collection of 250 works by 80 international artists. Many of these works are displayed in our Düsseldorf headquarters, giving more than 2000 employees free and unfettered access to contemporary art.“

Francis Outred, Chairman and Head of Post War and Contemporary Art, EMERI: “Back in 1994 when the tendency was for cool conceptual art, Provinzial Rheinland displayed a brave collecting vision by recognising that Peter Doig was developing a new approach to painting which gave new life and energy to the medium. Standing in front of this work one is taken to a different world and through the whiteout gradually we see a memory of his childhood home landscape and begin to pick out the silhouettes of Doig himself and his brother. Up close the thick texture of snow and staccato brushmarks create a tapestry of paint, the like of which nobody had seen before.”

Cobourg 3 + 1 More was painted in London in 1994 – a pivotal year that saw the production of some of Doig’s most celebrated canvases including Ski Jacket (Tate, London) and Pond Life, both included in his Turner Prize exhibition that year, as well as Blotter (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).  Marking the culmination of the artist’s meditations on the snow-filled landscapes of his Canadian youth, Doig depicts four figures – including flickering traces of him and his brother – standing on the shore of a frozen lake in Cobourg, where he grew up. As the blizzard subsumes their forms, foreground and background dissolve into a near-cinematic expanse of painterly abstraction, dramatising the slippages of reverie, daydream and memory. A centrepiece of Doig’s major touring retrospectives at Tate, London (2008) and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2015), the work represents a tour de force of the diverse influences that nourished his early painterly aesthetic, filtering, splicing and recombining the languages of Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Pierre Bonnard and Pieter Bruegel.

As Peter Doig has said: “We’ve all experienced the sensation of light dropping and producing strange natural effects, and I think in a way I am using these natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting … When I was making the “snow” paintings I was looking a lot at Monet, where there is this incredibly extreme, apparently exaggerated use of colour.“

The painting bears witness to Doig‘s fascination with Claude Monet’s study of winter light: spellbound visions of frozen beauty, punctuated by revolutionary prismatic effects. At the same time, Cobourg 3 + 1 More demonstrates the depth of Doig’s engagement with the legacy of abstraction. Beneath the Pollock-esque furore of action painting that covers the surface, Doig crafts an architectonic structure reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s ‘zip’ paintings: a decisive influence on the artist during his formative years. Against the three horizontal planar divisions of the canvas – a structure that runs like a golden thread throughout Doig’s practice – a forest of vertical lines springs up on the horizon, splintering the canvas into infinite shards. In counterpoint with this underlying geometry, Doig’s reverberant chromatic strata echo the quivering colour fields of Mark Rothko, unfurling and mingling across the canvas as if on a single continuum.

Notes to the editors

Christie’s Landmark Sales of Peter Doig Paintings: The upcoming sale of Cobourg 3 + 1 More follows the recent landmark sales of Doig’s paintings at Christie‘s, with five of the highest auction prices for paintings by Peter Doig established in the past three years including: Swamped (1990, sold for US$25.925.000, World Record Price for the artist at auction, May 2015 / New York), Pine House (Rooms for Rent) (1994, sold for US$18.085.000, November 2014 / New York), Gasthof (2002-2004, sold for ‎£9.938.500 GBP/US$17.038.402, July 2014 / London), The Architect's Home in the Ravine (1991, sold for ‎£11.282.500/US$16.304.191, February 2016 / London), Cabin Essence (1993-1994, sold for ‎£9.602.500/US$14.823.248, October 2015 / London).        

About Provinzial Rheinland: Corporate collection and cultural engagement

Since its inception in 1836, Provinzial Rheinland has supported the arts and cultural activity in the Rhineland in a variety of ways. Provinzial has set an important impetus for the cultural landscape of the region with the establishment of a collection of German and international contemporary art, the founding of a cultural and social foundation and the development of a funding series for museums "Provinzial - Engagement in the Rhineland for contemporary art". In the course of the latter Provinzial funded important cooperations and exhibition projects with a total of 11 museums of the region over a period of six years (2005-2010) - including the commissioning of works such as Metamorphosis by Polish artist Paulina Olowska for the museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach or The Staircase of the artist Monika Sosnowska, also living in Warsaw, a large installation for the Lichthof in the entrance area of ​​the K21 in Düsseldorf. Through donations and long-term loans from the Provinzial to the individual museums, the co-operation continues to this day. A further focus of Provinzial's cultural commitment is the company's collection, which today comprises more than 250 works by 80 artists. The foundation of the collection was laid in the early 1990s, when the Provinzial headquarter moved from the inner city of Düsseldorf to a new building in the district of Wersten. The idea was to compliment the contemporary architecture with a collection of equally contemporary art from all disciplines, with the focus less on established names and more on young artists. Particular attention was paid to the art of the numerous graduates and todays teachers of the renowned Düsseldorf Art Academy,  such as Peter Doig, who have shaped the region in a lasting way. The collection spans from painting (Peter Doig, Maxim Kantor, Karin Kneffel, Pia Fries, Michael Bach) and photography (Stan Douglas, Boris Becker, Matthias Hoch, Mischa Kuball, Toshio Shibata) over collage (Mike Kelley, Chris Ofili, Imi Knoebel) to sculpture and ceramics (Barbara Stehr, Jai-Young Park). It provides an insight into the versatility of today's art production through presenting these commonly separate disciplines next to each other. The strategic approach of the collection has always been to focus on Provinzial’s staff thus it is integrated into all public areas of the headquarter building, implementing the concept of "art in the workplace". The art is displayed on all floors at the "junctures" of the corridors, where the paths of many employees cross each other daily and analytical conversation is possible. In addition, an Artothek of 1700 works on paper is available to Provinzial’s staff, in order to create an individual workspace with works of art from the collection. Often, this has resulted in decades of "partnerships" between artwork and employee. For many years art has been part of the Provinzial workplace and the close intertwining enriches and inspires both worlds.