30 April - 30 May 2009
Elizabeth Peyton’s fifth show at Sadie Coles HQ marks a series of departures in her range of subjects, style and palette. There are pictures of people, this time including Barak and Michelle Obama, as well as still-lifes and cityscapes of New York.
Peyton works most often in oil paint, but also in watercolour, pencil, and etching. She is celebrated for her vivid and lush pictures of people: rock gods, film stars, fellow artists and friends. Frequently assuming the position of the fan herself, Peyton turns the untouchable, super-mediated, iconic celebrity of Cobain, Gallagher, Doherty and Barat into the familiar personable contiguity of Kurt, Liam, Pete and Carl. Sexually ambiguous, feminine qualities are regularly emphasised; skin is the palest of tones, lips dark and sumptuous, and features almost ethereal in their fragility. In recent times Peyton has devised a series of still-lifes suffused by the intimacies of reading. Literary sources invoked are markedly nineteenth century, French, and predominantly strands of Realism and Romanticism as found in works by Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac and Gustav Flaubert, works that begin the definition of the Modern and are steeped in revolution. Between fantasy and reality, waves of passion - the intensities of first love and the traumas of loss - run throughout.
Elizabeth Peyton was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1965, and studied at The School of Visual Arts, New York. She has exhibited widely internationally. Currently her solo show Live Forever is at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; touring internationally it began at the New Museum, New York, and will continue at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Holland. She also has an exhibition at the Irish Musem of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, Reading and Writing, a show that brings together some of Peyton’s literary-infused works. Group shows include The Painting of Modern Life at the Hayward Gallery, London, 2007, and Surprise, Surprise at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 2006. A catalogue accompanies the present show at IMMA and a monograph of her work, Elizabeth Peyton, was published by Rizzoli International Publications, 2005. She lives and works in Long Island, New York.
23 February - 02 April 2005
For her third exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ Elizabeth Peyton presents new paintings and drawings of personal friends and fellow artists as well as subjects from the music, film and fashion worlds. Drawn in by the charisma of certain public and historical figures, Peyton bypasses their aura of fame to respond to details of their personal history, extending to them the tenderness with which she paints those close to her. Her portraits are utterly devoid of the voyeurism and intrusive gaze of the media, but express instead a sensual admiration akin to romantic poetry. Subjects for this body of work include François Truffaut, the dancer Michael Clark, artist Urs Fischer and musician Keith Richards.
23 March - 29 April 2000
Who will believe my verse in time to come if it were filled with your most high deserts? Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb which hides your life and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, and in fresh numbers number all your graces, the age to come would say ‘This poet lies; such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’ So should my papers, yellowed with their age, be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue, and your true rights be termed a poet’s rage and stretched metre of an antique song. But were some child of yours alive that time, you should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.
Sonnet XVII, William Shakespeare
24 February - 09 April 1998
Peyton simply has a natural ability to paint with remarkably rare conviction while leaving a little mystery in our mind, a mystery to which we suspect we have an answer and yet never confidently put into words. This is best demonstrated by a work entitled Tokyo (craig) in which an unrecognizable figure is silhouetted against a (hotel room?) window. Here you can see everything Peyton does so well without the usual content question rearing its head. Rendered almost entirely in regal purple, the image seems to have used for photographic reference a wrong exposure that didn’t take back-light into account, thus obscuring the figure who becomes simultaneously an intimate and a stranger.
Paul O Kane, Zing Magazine