EDINBURGH.- The National Galleries of Scotland presents the first major exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Peter Doig in the country of his birth at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh from 3 August – 3 November 2013.

The exhibition, Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands showcases works created during the past ten years, much of which the artist has spent in Trinidad. Often tropical in their subject matter, these are paintings of intense colour on a monumental scale.

Peter Doig is one of the most highly regarded and internationally-renowned painters working today. Over a career of nearly three decades, he has reinvigorated the medium of painting. His inventive style, sensuous palette and suggestive imagery set him apart form the conceptualism dominating much of contemporary art. A willingness to take up the challengestill posed by the paintings of Gauguin, Matisse, Bonnard and Edward Hopperplaces him in a long line of great colourists, expressive handlers of paint and creators of richly textured worlds

Peter Doig said:"I left Scotland as a child as many of my generation did; however I know Edinburgh, the city where I was born, through many visits as a child and youth. To be able to exhibit my paintings in the magnificentrooms of the National Galleries is a great great honour."

Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art said: “Peter Doig has been one of the most consistently inventive and seductive painters working anywhere in the worldtoday. His art is figurative and often based on photographic images, but the end effect is to take us into a completely different world of often hallucinatory power. The works reveal a transforming vision of the world, steeped in a sense of beauty and mystery, rich in their imaginative suggestion yet remaining grounded in the real.”

Peter Doig first came to prominence in the 1990s with his paintings of winter landscapes, highly atmospheric scenes of lakes (often with a lone canoe), and houses screened by trees and ski slopes. The rich and layered surfaces of his paintings showedthat he was as much interested in abstract, formal qualities as he was in subject matter.

Over the period covered by the exhibition, he has split his time between a house and studio in Trinidad, a studio in London and a professorship at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. His peripatetic life, memories of a childhood partly spent in Canada and his later life and studies in London have given him a particularly rich visual knowledge. Regardless of where his motifs originate, his experiences cross-fertilize and enhance his works. As fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in The Silverado Squatters: There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign. Doig the traveller is not merely a foreigner seeking out the exotic; rather, he is like Baudelaire’s flâneur, whose eye uncovers and finds significance in details which transcend locale, while spanning both time and space.

Following its debut in Edinburgh, No Foreign Lands: Peter Doig, travels to Canada, where it will be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montréal curated by Stéphane Aquin.