Peter Doig's rainbow bridge work poised to set auction record

Artist Peter Doig’s painting of Toronto's rainbow tunnel is poised for sale in London Monday, with Country-rock (wing-mirror) potentially leaving auction records in the rear-view mirror.

Expected to shatter auction records, the work has whipped the art world into a frenzy but also left the uninitiated scratching their heads.

When it goes on the block Monday, Sotheby’s expects the oil landscape to fetch more than $16.5 million dollars — a price tag so high, it could make the Scottish-born Doig Britain's most expensive living artist. 

Doig grew up in Canada and his Country-rock (wing-mirror) depicts a familiar Toronto scene: the cheerful sweep of colours on an underpass beside the Don Valley Parkway.        

It is arguably his most recognizable work, one that the auction house describes as transporting the viewer into a "fantastical realm of reverie."

But, as Sotheby's expert Cheyenne Westphal explains in the attached video, his works don’t just command eight figures because he's a "great master of British painting."

"Peter is an artist that has got a very dedicated and very passionate and collectors' base. They have been driving his prices at auction, and privately, for the past three to four years."

Doig's 1991 landscape Road House fetched about $13 million at a Christie's auction in New York in May, while the same auction house sold another of his Toronto-inspired works — Jetty — for about $10.5 million in London in June 2013.

The current record for a Doig work is yet another Toronto painting: The Architect's Home in the Ravine, which sold for about $14 million in London in February 2013.

Deana Sumanac has the story on The National Monday night.