Elizabeth Peyton, David Bowie, 2012
“Elizabeth Peyton was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1965. She earned her BFA in 1987 from the School of Visual Arts in New York. In the early 1990s, Peyton began exhibiting her portraits in alternative, unofficial locales, such as the Chelsea Hotel in New York in 1993 and the Prince Albert Pub in London in 1995. From her earliest exhibitions, Peyton’s works polarized opinion in an art world that largely judged contemporary figurative pieces as irrelevant or passé. However, she was at the forefront of a reevaluation of figurative work and has exhibited regularly since 1995.
Peyton treats the subjects of her portraits with a distinctive intimacy, whether they are friends, historical icons, or famous musicians. Her ever-expanding repertoire of recurring subjects includes Kurt Cobain, Andy Warhol, Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Elizabeth II, Piotr Uklanski, and David Hockney, among many others. She paints from both life and from varied source material like found photographs, film stills, famous paintings, or mass media images. Her portraits, lovingly created with gestural brushstrokes of diluted oil paint, investigate how art and mass media affect the viewer’s emotional and intellectual response to the person depicted.
Peyton has exhibited regularly at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York since 1995, at Neugerriemschneider Kunstgalerie in Berlin since 1996, and at Sadie Coles HQ in London since 1998. Solo museum exhibitions of Peyton’s work have been organized by Saint Louis Art Museum (1997–98), Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel (1998), and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (2008). Her work has also been included in a major exhibition such as SITE Santa Fe (1997), Whitney Biennial (2004), and Drawings from the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2005). In 2006, she was honored with the Larry Aldrich Award. Peyton lives and works in New York.”
Guggenheim.org. (n.d.). Elizabeth Peyton. [online] Available at: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Elizabeth-Peyton [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018].
“There is a naive innocence to the portraits of superstars by Elizabeth Peyton, as if they’ve been painted by a schoolgirl with a crush. Copying from photographs in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine and Hello!, Peyton instills romance and mysticism into the quixotic figures of Peter Doherty and Kurt Cobain. Each picture is painted in oil or watercolour, with the drips running down the page as if the figures might melt into the background. For a time, most of her portraits were of men, all imbued with a cool, androgynous quality. It would be easy to dismiss them as the work of a fame-fixated teenager, but these are not random passions. Peyton chooses her subjects carefully, selecting people for whom she feels a close affinity and manipulating glossy press photographs into intimate, painted portraits. What is surprising is their size, often no more than 11in high; these larger-than-life characters are brought down from their pedestals into the confines of Peyton’s tiny canvasses.
The first contemporary portrait Peyton tackled was that of Kurt Cobain, in her belief that the cult of the celebrity was the subject of her time. It is something she is often forced to defend, and like Andy Warhol, she is very aware of the insatiable fascination for her subject matter. In interviews, she seems to imply it is not the beauty or the talent of famous people that mesmerises her, but their rebellious dismissal of societal constraints. Her subjects are those musicians – the Jarvis Cockers, the Kurt Cobains, the Keith Richardses – who, arguably, remain true to themselves: personalities uninhibited by management, record contracts and the like. This untouchable quality remains a constant in her work, whether she is painting political leaders, artists, actors or her boyfriends. The common theme is that each, in some form or another, inspires her devotion.”
Lack, J. (2009). Artist of the week 36: Elizabeth Peyton. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/apr/08/artist-elizabeth-peyton [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018].
Michalis Theodosiou 