Simone Kennedy Doig tends to stop short of making grandiose statements about her work, but sometimes she gets close. “They’re all about grief and life and death, I guess,” she tells CULTURED in her London studio. This week, the 32-year-old unveils four towering canvases at the Approach, a gallery set above an east London pub, for her first solo exhibition in the city that’s something like home to her.
Kennedy Doig was born in London but grew up mostly in Trinidad, where her family moved in 2002. (Her father, the renowned painter Peter Doig, spent his own early childhood there and returned with Kennedy Doig’s mother and four siblings.) She moved back to the U.K. as an adult to study at Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art. The paintings in this exhibition, titled “November to November” and on view through Dec. 19, chronicle a year in her corner of the city, animated by the pronounced seasonal shifts between canvases and the intense, slightly unfamiliar lens through which she seems to view it.
The scenes—of a hunched figure fidgeting with their hands outside a hospital, a trio of statuesque women sunbathing at the foot of a tower block, a policeman walking through the chaos of Notting Hill Carnival—are mostly unremarkable, rendered at cinematic scale in a style that, though painterly and occasionally erratic, is overwhelmingly lucid. But they contain flickers of something profound, each quotidian scene vibrating with the impression of a life that is complicated and sometimes painful, but no less beautiful for that. “They are very mundane, fleeting moments,” she explains, “but I try to catch something in it.”
The Russian-British architect Berthold Lubetkin haunts the work, just as he has long haunted Kennedy Doig’s life in the U.K. The Brutalist pioneer is responsible for almost all of the buildings in the paintings. They include the Finsbury Health Centre, her childhood doctor’s office; the Penguin Pool at London Zoo, which she has been painting since she was at the Slade; and Highpoint II, a building housing an apartment that once belonged to her late mother. “She always hoped to live there after she moved back from Trinidad,” Kennedy Doig says. “Unfortunately, she died six years ago, so she never got to live in the flat.” Until the start of this year, Kennedy Doig lived there with her boyfriend. (They now live elsewhere in London. He often models for her paintings; in this show, he’s the policeman.)
Lubetkin, who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1931, was another almost-Londoner, which may explain Kennedy Doig’s affinity for his work. “It’s home but it’s not home,” she says. “I’ve always felt a bit like an outsider. But maybe Lubetkin did too.”
In the Caribbean, Kennedy Doig grew up worlds away from the city and its art scene, where her father was being lauded as an emerging titan of contemporary British painting. She was still surrounded by art, though. “I didn’t go to many museums, but I was always in and out of artists’ studios,” she says. She remembers the buoying impact of wandering in and out of the studios of CCA7, a now-shuttered art center in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago’s capital. (The space famously housed StudioFilmClub, a film screening hub her father founded with the Trinidadian artist Che Lovelace.) “It felt like it was possible to be an artist,” Kennedy Doig says. Both she and her father owe a debt to the landscape and culture of Trinidad and have an intuitive eye for the scenes that deserve to be painted, but that’s where a comparison between their work ends, with the elder Doig’s subjects tending to skew more explicitly fantastical than those of his daughter, who paints what she sees.
When she returned to London, her artistic pedigree quickly became apparent. She remembers her interview at the Slade, one of the city’s most prestigious art schools, where a professor (who, she says, didn’t know her full name thanks to the college’s semi-anonymized interview process) asked which artists she was interested in. After she offered a few names, they inquired as to whether she was familiar with Peter Doig, “I went bright red,” she remembers. “I was like: ‘Yeah, I know his work quite well.’”
In the past five years, Kennedy Doig has had solo exhibitions in LA, Berlin, and Shanghai, but London feels especially significant. She first met Jake Miller, one of the Approach’s founders, a few years ago at the nearby restaurant St. John. Miller tells CULTURED that he and the gallery’s co-owner Emma Robertson have since been “watching the work develop to a point where we felt the time was right to offer her a solo show.” It’s quite the offer; since it opened in 1997, the Approach has mounted pre-breakthrough exhibitions of now-prominent artists including Enrico David, Rose Wylie, and Allison Katz.
While she still feels formed by Trinidad, Kennedy Doig has found her niche in London. Her three sisters frequently model for her—two of them are sunbathers in High Point Bathers, 2026—and she describes her work as impacted by ongoing dialogues with London-based painters including Lisa Brice and Celia Paul.
The latter, who is well-known for her paintings of her own sisters, shares with Kennedy Doig an ability to find almost universal-feeling resonances in images of her own life: the people who surround her and the trace-like memories of those who are gone. “So much of it is about life and death and grief,” Kennedy Doig declares of Paul’s work, echoing—this time, in a more confident register—her description of her own. “I think it made me channel my grief through my paintings, too.”
At one point, during her mother’s illness, Kennedy Doig was painting hospital beds. Today, her work alludes to what she’s lost by way of a feeling that isn’t traceable to a single point. Instead, it pervades entire canvases, whose filmic vividness will be familiar to anyone who has experienced the sporadic episodes of acute clarity that can accompany periods of grief. She’s still not sure how much viewers should know about the inner world that the paintings grew from—whether her own biography should be explicitly mapped onto the work. “I haven’t really figured that out yet,” she admits. “Maybe some things are better left unsaid.”
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