ART CITIES: London-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: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Elizabeth Peyton in her solo exhibition “Angel” presents new paintings and works on paper, this is the first presentation of Peyton’s work in London since Aire and Angels, her 2019 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which placed her paintings alongside historical works of portraiture drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. The works are all traces of a “visionary company of love,” as the poet Hart Crane put it in his powerful poem about cathedrals from 1932, “The Broken Tower.” To discover this visionary company in an exhibition whose title can be traced back to the ancient Greek term angelos, meaning messenger, protector, someone who comes to guide us on our way. Peyton’s subjects all become angels in her work, where light and emotion are rendered with the intensity of her distinctive humanism: a close-looking akin to love. In each subject’s specificity, the artist transmits the universal feelings that connect us to each other and to art, that stretch from our present moment back through time. In their togetherness, they constitute a painted world transmitting that ecstatic life force we feel in cathedrals and on mountain tops and which is present in each of us.

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.

Photo left: Elizabeth Peyton, Spencer, 1999. Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, © Elizabeth Peyton, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, Photo right: Elizabeth Peyton, Spencer Walking, 2001. Collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art, © Elizabeth Peyton, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 7/6-28/7/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/