When Peter Doig’s White Canoe sold at a Sotheby’s for $11.3 million in 2007—setting an auction record for a living European artist—the painter transitioned from widely revered to international star. Doig was born in Scotland, in 1962, and graduated with an M.A. from the Chelsea School of Art in 1990. Shortly thereafter he won the Whitechapel Artist Prize, which granted him a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in 1991. That same year, he completed the oil on canvas White Canoe—a landscape held taut, like much of his work, between the real and the imagined. Since 2007, Doig’s paintings have continued to sell for millions. Now a selection of them (along with works by Francis Bacon, Vija Celmins, Mark Rothko, and others) are on view at Gagosian, in an exhibition curated by the artist himself. —Jack Sullivan