Albemarle Gallery

Maxwell Doig was born in Huddersfield. He graduated from Manchester School of Art in 1988 with a BA in Fine Art and went on to pursue his postgraduate studies in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art, London, between 1988 and 1990. Doig is preoccupied with the human figure and its spatial relationship combined with the interplay of light and shade. His use of unconventional viewpoints depicting static solitary figures along with the application of subtle pigments and textural complexity results in contemplative ephemeral imagery. In 1997 he was awarded the Villiers David Prize. He lives and works in Manchester.

'The art of Maxwell Doig is immediately recognisable as his, not only because of his very individual deployment of various painterly techniques, but also, primarily indeed, because of his distinctive vision. Such skill in purely representational painting is rare indeed these days, but one does not win the Villiers David Prize, as Doig did in 1997, for skill alone. What makes Doig stand out, then and now, is his visions of life itself. As he puts it, “In an age when everything is moving so fast, I’m interested in portraying stillness and quiet” And who, in the light of Vermeer and Hammersmith, can argue with that?'

John Russell Taylor, Art Critic and Writer