One of the storage places for Doig’s complex pictures – and thus the associative starting point for painterly transformations – is the personal memory of places and events. Many of them have got to do with popular culture and the psycho-dynamics of rock music.

In the case of Buffalo Station (the picture section has the same title as the much larger complete work) a self-made snapshot inspired the painting process many years after the fact. As an 18-year-old, Doig made a pilgrimage to Buffalo to see a Rolling Stones concert. His snapshot – it was an undeveloped negative that the artist found later – shows the situation after the concert has ended; a community dissolves back into individuals. Each fan takes his experience with him back into his own life. In the choice of colours, the intoxicating experience of the rock concert appears to resound like feedback while, at the same time, the schematic outlines of the figures appear strangely empty and lost.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)