Elizabeth Peyton is an American artist recognised for her intimate portraits of celebrities, historical figures, and friends. Drawing from a diverse range of source material, Elizabeth Peyton's well-known creations have included portraits of David Bowie, Leonardo DiCaprio, and members of the British royal family.
Read MoreElizabeth Peyton was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1965 and studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Her work first drew public attention at her debut solo exhibition in 1993, which was held in a room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. The exhibition included portraits of historical figures, including Napoleon Bonaparte, Marie Antoinette, and King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Open 24 hours a day and completely unstaffed, the room was only accessible by key, which visitors had to ask for at the hotel reception.
The critical response to Elizabeth Peyton's art was initially mixed, as the reigning current of conceptualism had sidelined much of representational painting within the contemporary art world. However, by the mid-1990s, a slate of positive reviews had solidified Peyton's position as a leading figure in the re-emergence of figurative painting.
By her 1995 show at Gavin's Brown Enterprise in New York, Peyton had achieved widespread acclaim. The self-titled exhibition featured a number of Peyton's celebrity portraits, providing a template for her most recognisable works. The standout works from this show were a series of portraits of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, who had taken his life a year earlier.
Describing painting 'as a way of holding onto things', Elizabeth Peyton's portraits engage with the fragility of life and brevity of youth. Her celebrity subjects, many of whom died young, are drawn from a variety of source material, including found photos, film stills, mass media images, and famous paintings. Rendered in short brushstrokes of diluted oil paint against a stark white surface of gesso, her paintings possess an ephemeral quality, drawing out the tension between the permanence of iconic imagery and the impermanence of life.
Peyton's exploration of the impact of art and media on ideas of beauty, fame, idolatry, and proximity has drawn parallels with the work of artists such as Andy Warhol, Édouard Manet, and John Singer Sargent. Like Peyton, Sargent, an Impressionist painter renowned for his portraits of Edwardian-era opulence, had an interest in painting the artists and writers he was acquainted with. In an interview with Harper's Bazaar in 2015, Peyton also lauds Sargent's use of paint as 'a revelation,' saying, 'It seemed like he painted in a way that was so fast, so open, and so abstract that it was almost a miracle that the paint somehow landed on the canvas to make a portrait.'
The Impressionist painter is also the subject of one of Peyton's portraits of historical figures, JSS John Singer Sargent (2015).
In the late 1990s, Peyton expanded her practice to include portraits of her friends and other artists. Unlike her portraits of celebrities, which are painted from found photographs, Peyton's portraits of friends are painted either from life or from photos Peyton has taken herself. As seen in Julie (Julie Mehretu) (2015), the result is subtler, with a heavier use of colour. In these works, Peyton's subjects are also painted their age, as opposed to Peyton's celebrity subjects, who are captured in their youth.
Since 1998, when the art magazine Parkett commissioned Peyton to make a lithograph, Peyton has worked with a variety of printmaking mediums, including monographs and woodcuts.
Around 2007, Peyton began to expand the focus of her practice from the figure to its broader environment, often featuring still life in compositions with cropped portraits. Some of these are featured in Elizabeth Peyton's monograph Dark Incandescence, published by Rizzoli in 2017.
In 2009, Elizabeth Peyton collaborated with artist Matthew Barney on Blood of Two, an exhibition and performance at DESTE Foundation Project Space, a former slaughterhouse on the Greek island of Hydra. For the work, the artists submerged a vessel containing drawings of animals and gods in graphite and blood. After three months, fishermen retrieved the vessel, adorned it with a shark carcass, and carried the container to the slaughterhouse, where its components were installed as an exhibition. Connecting the function of the slaughterhouse with the traditional rituals of the island through animal sacrifice, Blood of Two draws together religion and paganism in a meeting of traditional and contemporary practices.
Elizabeth Peyton's paintings and drawings are held in numerous major public institutions and collections around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunstmuseum Basel; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Boros Collection, Berlin.
In 2019, Peyton held a major retrospective at London's National Portrait Gallery, entitled Aire and Angels. The show travelled to UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing as Elizabeth Peyton: Practice in 2020.
Selected solo exhibitions include Elizabeth Peyton: Still Life, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2017); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2013); Wagner, Gallery Met, New York (2011); Reading and Writing, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009); and Live Forever, New Museum, New York; Walker Art Center Minneapolis; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastrict (all 2008).
Selected group exhibitions include Artists for New York, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2020); Side by Side: Dual Portraits of Artists, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); Elizabeth Peyton & Camille Claudel: Eternal Idol, Villa Medici, Rome (2017); Van Gogh Live!, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles (2014); Re:emerge–Towards a New Cultural Cartography, Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); Whitney Biennial (2004); Examining Pictures, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (all 1999); and Projects 60: John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997).
Online work by Elizabeth Peyton can be found at this website.
Alena Kavka | Ocula | 2021
