ART CITIES:Salzburg-Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton is best known for her intimate, small-scale portraits of celebrities, friends, and historical figures. Characterized by transparent washes of pigment and a jewel-tone palette, Peyton’s works address notions of idolatry and obsession. Payton pays special attention to their inner state and the very situation in which they are being portrayed.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Archive

“Eventyr” is Elizabeth Peyton’s first exhibition in Salzburg since her solo presentation at Salzburger Kunstverein in 2002. The exhibition draws its title from the old Norse word for fairytale or adventure. Through a group of portraits and still life scenes the artist addresses themes that have recurred throughout her career. At the same time, she erases the distinctions between painterly genres, arriving at an expanded mode of portraiture that oscillates between the personal and the operatic. In its expressive and temporal range, her latest body of work looks back to a number of key moments in her career. The first was her debut exhibition in New York in 1993, in room 828 of The Chelsea Hotel. Accessed by a key that was left at the front desk, the room contained framed drawings of historical subjects, ranging from recent events to farther-flung (or even fictional) moments. In their deftness and dynamism of touch, these early works reflected influences as divergent as Abstract Expressionism, Van Dyck and Whistler. Peyton’s latest works exhibit a similar combination of thematic and stylistic layering. They address contemporary subjects through the prism of historical painting, and vice versa, while using a breadth of marks – alternately tentative and visceral – to achieve a vital, volatile effect. Peyton’s exhibition in 1995 at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, consisted mostly of paintings of the recently deceased Kurt Cobain, along with pictures of Sid Viscious and John Lydon. Her range subsequently expanded to include portraits of artists (often made from life), sports figures, still life scenes, transcriptions of other artists’ works, images of musicians, and cityscapes – a plurality of themes that was reflected in her embrace of eclectic media including pencil, monotype, oil paint, colour paste, and various modes of printmaking. From the mid-1990s, her work has been characterised, in this way, by a mediation between the present-day and the historical, between personal and collective histories, and between the intensity of immediate experience and the compelling otherness (both temporal and spatial) of remembered or reimagined subjects. In 2011, Peyton was invited by the Gallery Met at the Met Opera in New York to make an exhibition about Richard Wagner, and attended that year’s production of Die Walküre. This marked the beginning of a significant new phase in her work, as she began to depict operas and operatic performers in her paintings, drawings and prints. This idea of accumulated time and feeling applies to Peyton’s recent works, in which particular subjects or scenes act as condensed expressions of human emotion in all its flux and complexity.

Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Villa Kast, Miravellplatz 2, Salzburg, Duration: 27/7-25/8/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-14:00, https://ropac.net